


So Runs the World Away

by Indybaggins



Category: Whose Line Is It Anyway? RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Military, Angst, End of the World, Explicit Sexual Content, First Kiss, First Time, Friendship/Love, M/M, Sexual Tension, Soldiers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-07
Updated: 2012-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-10 00:22:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 39,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1152581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indybaggins/pseuds/Indybaggins
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twenty years of war and us and war again. Twenty, let’s say that’s all we’ve got. </p><p>After failing in comedy, Ryan joins the army. And that decision changes everything…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was my NaNo novel for 2011. I have moved the timeline up by several years because of technological and practical reasons. I have little knowledge of the US military or their missions beyond what I could find online, so please consider this a heavily fictionalized version. I wrote this story while listening to Josh Ritter music, both the title and some of the more important scenes have references to his songs. And last but not least, many hugs and thanks to my beta accordingtomel, whose patience and awesomeness have made this story what it is today!
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> [](http://smg.photobucket.com/user/indybaggins/media/03bestromance2012a_zpsaa0915aa.png.html)  
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> [](http://smg.photobucket.com/user/indybaggins/media/29bestwives2012_zpsfecb1812.png.html)  
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> [](http://smg.photobucket.com/user/indybaggins/media/13bestryan2012_zpsaff385fb.png.html)  
> 

 

 

(Ryan, 2010)

Ryan walks towards the missile silo door, slides his badge through the lock, and waits for the guard on the other side to open it. The day is hot, and he can feel the sun beating down on his shoulders, burn the small edge of his neck above the collar of his army issue jacket. He’s in fatigues, green and tan, carrying a half-empty eighty liter backpack slung across one shoulder. He’s still holding the wrapper of a muesli bar he ate on the way over, his fingers sticky with remnants of crumbs and honey. It’s the only thing he has eaten today, and he stills feels the texture of it in his mouth, dry and heavy.

He’s thirsty. 

He stuffs the wrapper into his left pants pocket, and shifts his weight. He’s late as well, he’s aware. They passed three roadblocks on the way here, and the soldier who drove him was so unnerved he had taken a wrong turn at least once. Out of the air-conditioned car, standing on the asphalt, no sliver of shadow in sight mid July in Arizona, Ryan starts to sweat almost immediately. He feels it bead up on his forehead, appear in the curve between his shoulder blades and damp his lower back. He presses his fingers towards the side of his neck, and rubs softly at the scratches there that already have started healing. It takes long minutes for the guard to reach the door. He thinks of Greg, the way he always does when he has to wait for something. The curve of Greg’s lips while smiling in an unguarded moment. The way his eyes light up when he makes a joke. He considers sliding his card through again, but that would seem desperate. He is in no way desperate. 

Eventually the door groans, and then opens, slowly. Ryan schools his face to show nothing of his earlier impatience. The guard on the other side is a dark-skinned man, young (‘too young’, he thinks), a formal enough salute but with troubled eyes. “Lieutenant Stiles, sir.” Ryan’s eyes travel towards the guard’s name insignia, but it’s empty. Before he can make an effort to ask the soldier’s full name he has moved away, and shows what had been hidden in the shadow behind him. Body bags. 

“How many?” Ryan asks while he steps inside, the temperature already noticeably dropping, and he does not need to repeat himself. He rarely does, these days. 

“Four today, sir. Three more are showing symptoms.” No wonder the man is afraid. 

Ryan waits for the soldier to close the giant door behind them, briefly wondering at the mechanism of metal boulders and slides that shuts down with an ominous high-pressured hiss. He does not really expect to see the outside of that door ever again, and he feels a stab of desperation at that, so fierce that he does not trust himself to turn around and look the soldier in the eye, let alone lead a dozen scared men. He takes a breath, and focuses on portraying authority. “Private?” 

The soldier’s stance at his side tenses instantly. Not that long out of training, then. 

“Show me what I’ve got to work with here.” 

The soldier grins and says, “Sir, yes, sir,” and leads him through the dark hallway and into an elevator, the air getting stale and artificially cold as they descend floor after floor, into the earth itself. The sweat on Ryan’s back dries up and gets replaced by an iron tension in his shoulders. He isn’t quite sure he can handle this, right now. But he can’t afford to break down either. 

So he looks over at the boy across from him, and asks him his name. Whether he has a wife, children, where he did his basic training. By the time the elevator reaches the lowest level he knows he is speaking to Private Wayne Brady, and that’s all Ryan really cares to remember. Not the picture of the gorgeous Hawaiian wife, and the cute curly-haired baby. Not that he had wanted to go into showbiz, before (and that is almost so ridiculously familiar he is surprised it can still make him nostalgic). 

Not that he is terrified, because they all are. 

Ryan lets himself be guided through the underground complex, curtly saluting at every soldier they pass by. Most of them look at him with unadulterated hope in their eyes. They want him to do something, to change what they know is about to happen. Worse, they believe that somehow, he can. 

He’s seen eyes like that before. On his first out-of-the-country mission, Somalia, they were trying to deliver humanitarian aid to where millions where starving. They’d had a hundred bags of rice, and thousands standing in line to be fed. It could have turned ugly easily, but it didn’t. Instead the people simply waited their turn and looked at him, their eyes haunting Ryan long after he had returned to US soil. They’d known they were about to die. They’d known, but against their own better judgment they had hoped anyway. 

He had handed out endless cups of rice that day, simply delaying the inevitable for a day or two more, and had secretly struggled to find the good in it. It was that thought, not to see death that eventually changed him. See one man die (in his arms a couple months later, Sudanian sniper, blood as red-bubbled wheeze coming out of Drew’s mouth, eyes frantically rolling back in his head), you are sad, but deep down, you are the same person you were that morning (and are deeply ashamed of that fact). See thousands about to die while you are powerless to stop it, and you become someone else altogether. He’s seen countless deaths since then. Some while holding his hand, quietly, some worlds away, screaming in agony. It’s always the knowing that’s worse. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 1986-1990)

Ryan is seventeen when he quits high school. He’s just a few credits shy of graduating, but he has big dreams, he wants to be -no, already _is_ \- a stand-up comedian. He lives from gig to gig, performs in dark dingy nightclubs, crashes on the sofa of a bunch of friendly strippers. He never sleeps with them because they won’t let him (even though on more than one occasion he begs). He does learn how to make a mean chili. How to sneak back stage anywhere. How to hand wash a bra. How to live away from everything expected and towards something different, something uniquely his. 

He is eighteen when he falls in love. Her name is Patricia and she works as a waitress at the local inn. She is strikingly pretty. She has brown hair, brown eyes and a tiny frame he imagines he can wrap himself around forever. He tries to make her smile constantly, and mostly just succeeds in making an ass of himself. But then one day she _does_ let him touch her, her soft breasts, pale hips, the slender curve of her spine as he lays behind her in her small, one-person bed. He changes her name to Pat, simply because it makes her laugh. He tells her that he is going to make it in comedy. That they are going to live together. That they will be happy. 

He is nineteen when Pat moves in with him. Together they manage to scrape by just enough to rent an apartment. Dreams made real. And of course, it’s so small that the both of them can’t fit in the bathroom or the kitchen at the same time (although Pat blames that on Ryan’s height more than on the apartment’s shortcomings). So old that the hot water only works occasionally, and the heating only in summer. The windows won’t open, no matter how hot it gets, except for the one in the moldy bathroom that has a huge hole in it. (“Gun-shot,” Ryan theorizes. “Fist,” Pat says). They stuff the hole with old newspapers, and take to leaving an old shoe in every room specifically to crush the cockroaches. 

It doesn’t bother Ryan all that much, living that way, but he knows that Pat secretly hates it. She often bursts into tears when she comes home after a long night of work only to sit down on a cockroach, or have to shiver through another shower. She tries to hide it from him though, and somehow, that makes it even worse. 

Ryan vows to try harder, but work is difficult to come by and eventually he has to take shifts as a dishwasher in a hotel, standing bent over with his hands in hot water and soap for eight hours straight, washing hundreds of dishes at minimum wage. He still tries to get comedy gigs and occasionally succeeds, loving it when he does, but they never pay enough to live on. Near the end of that first winter Pat hesitantly starts talking about moving back to live with her parents, and it is on a night like that, the both of them huddled up under a blanket, watching the old antenna-television a friend has given them, that Ryan takes a deep breath and says “Maybe you should marry me instead.” 

She doesn’t accept right away, but her body moves over his that night, and by morning her eyes are bright with hope when she says “All right, okay, I’ll be your wife,” and he kisses her again and again, trying to feel the impact of what they have just decided.

He is twenty when they get married. The wedding itself is a small affair; they both wear borrowed clothes and only invite friends, no family, and get Chinese take-out after. Pat laughs often though, so Ryan thinks she must be happy. 

They steadily save up to move on to something better until Pat slips at work and breaks her ankle, and then they are back to depending on their savings heavily. Ryan takes on double shifts, and it is after one of those, his hands red and wrinkled from the chemicals, his back hurting so much that he can barely walk up right, that he passes an army recruiter on the street and gets handed a pamphlet. He doesn’t even read it, but sticks it in his jeans pocket where Pat finds it while doing the laundry. 

Over the next few days, she starts telling him little details about army life. The great pay. Base housing. Insurance, health care, a safe space to raise their children, a career for him. Once the idea is there, she wants him to go into the military. And although he has absolutely no desire to, Ryan reluctantly considers it. He can stay at a level-entry job forever, living in crappy apartments with Pat, continue to hope that one day, he will make it, or he can make something of himself now. What, he is slightly embarrassed to admit he doesn’t quite know; he has some vague ideas about shooting a gun, wearing a uniform and being yelled at while crawling under barbed wire. Three of his brothers have joined the air force, and although he was too young at the time to be involved in their decision, he did see the change in them when they came back. They seemed bigger, somehow. 

And yes, it hurts him immensely to walk through the door of that recruitment office, to sit down and explain his situation, to sign away all of his dreams, but in the end he does do it and it doesn’t feel like it is wrong. 

 

Ryan is twenty-one by the time he starts his basic training, and it is harder than he ever imagined. Even at his height, he has never been much of an athlete, and the heavy training schedule is beyond demanding. The first weeks he has constant blisters on his hands from loading and reloading his gun all day long. He has to do without combat boots for a while because they have to specially order his size in, and when he finally gets them he is in pain every step for days, socks sticky with dried blood. His dog tags are cold on his breast bone, a jiggling weight to get used to. His blonde curls get shaved off, and his scalp looks fragile and strange without. 

When he looks in the mirror, vision often hazy with weariness, Ryan doesn’t recognize himself any more. He has a hard expression on his face now, clothes hanging even more around his frame than usual. He never once cries, but it is close a couple of times, when they get forced to do another run at five in the morning and they haven’t seen their beds in days. When he has to do an endless amount of push-ups in the rain, arms trembling so badly eventually he can’t hold out anymore and falls down, face first, in the freezing mud, and is forced to do an extra hundred because of it. But eventually, he gains a couple pounds in muscle and learns to do what had to be done. No thoughts. Just action. And, even though he never would have admitted it, at that point of numb, mindless exhaustion it is frankly comforting to let another think for you. To simply endure, and know that everything will be all right in the end. 

He has never been fond of camping before, but now he learns to enjoy the open air, to cook on a gas stove or open fire, to build shelters and navigate forests. He has always been more of a loner than anything else, but his innate sense of humor gets him out of a sticky situation more than once, and soon he is shoulder-clapping with the best of them. Corporal Drew Carey, a former marine now army man, and Mike McShane, the unit’s combat engineer with a booming voice and an incredible sense of humor, become his instant friends. Both have done comedy before as well, and it doesn’t take long before they start to think of ways to perform together. 

And once out on a mission, even if it is just a national training one, Ryan realizes that the real army rhythm is nothing like the constant drilling, pushing and prodding he had gotten in the beginning. Instead, it can almost be leisurely at times; days spent waiting, hours upon hours in the back of jeeps, strapped in large supply planes, or waist-deep in some self-dug manhole. Between the bursts of action and the mindless compliance there is calm, and he finds a new sort of steadiness in it. 

And then, at twenty-two, he meets Greg Proops. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 1991)

They’re in Fort Hood, Texas, and it’s a Saturday night.

It’s incredibly warm, Ryan’s sweating dark circles into his tan t-shirt before he even finishes his stand-up introduction, but he isn’t the only one. Drew is across from him, cheeks bright red, and from where Ryan is standing he can see sweat run in small rivulets down Mike’s brow. It’s going amazingly well, everyone laughing even with the jokes he knows they have heard before. Military men are a great audience, willing to forgive anything because they’re just that damn happy to be entertained. The tension is slowly building, and Ryan grins brightly at both Drew and Mike, and then Clive (their chaplain, roped into presenting) as well. 

That night, there are even more spectators than usual. Obviously, word got around because the barrack is crammed to the nooks with boisterous, half-drunk soldiers. Clive smiles back earnestly before getting on center stage to make a speech about new blood, talent from another unit, some translator. It’s been a struggle, trying to find a fourth. They’ve been looking for months, but it’s not because a guy is funny during lunch that he can do the same on a stage and frankly they’ve tried nearly everyone in their unit. So now they’re outsourcing, and Clive is pulling the man onto the stage. Specialist Greg Proops. Ryan gets a quick impression of the mandatory buzz-cut, large glasses and a smirk, and they are off playing a scene. 

It immediately fizzles, sparks and booms. Ryan sets the background carefully: a bar, his hands cleaning an imaginary counter, doing dishes, throwing a towel over his shoulder. The new guy, Greg saunters in, and looks him over. He leans over the bar, and says, annunciating clearly, “You know, soldier, if this was the cold war…” 

Ryan turns his head, pretends to waiting for what is sure to be the punch line. Greg leans even closer, and looks Ryan in the eye. ”…we could keep each other warm.” 

Ryan can feel himself swallow back a laugh, and whatever reply he might have had (and he doesn’t remember, later, what he was going to say) dies in the laughter of a hundred homophobic soldiers crammed in a wooden barrack. They think it’s hilarious. 

Ryan plays out the game refusing to pretend he had been a woman all along (the usual excuse in such a scene) and allows Greg to shamelessly flirt with him. The audience eats it up, and Greg stays right there with him, every word, every barb funny and thrilling. They end the scene to a large applause, and Ryan looks over at Drew and Mike, knowing that they’re all thinking the same thing. 

They’ve found their guy.

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

(Greg, 2010)

Every morning Greg opens his eyes, he first listens, feels for his own heartbeat underneath his dog tags. It reminds him of the cadence of a dance. He often imagines it’s his life line to Ryan and that’s intensely maudlin, yes, but he hasn’t seen Ryan in months. Hasn’t heard from him. All he knows, what the radio guys assure him, is that he’s still alive. And that he asks for Greg often as well, (said with obvious irritation in their voice) which, silly as that is, still pleases him. He likes to imagine Ryan annoying them, nagging for information from wherever he is. He knows Ryan is in the middle of a heavily infected zone with people dying everywhere, courtesy of Jen who flirted with an officer just to get that. Greg thanks her, and then wishes he wouldn’t have known. 

Greg himself is stuck in Kabul with a younger translator in training, Private Jeff Davis. They don’t do language training the way he learned it any more, six months of college. It’s a waste of army dollars to educate someone that much when they could die just as well at home; now they get sent out into the field, and if they survive long enough to pick up something of the language, get placed with an experienced translator to learn. 

Jeff is a pale man, skinny and beautiful even in his too loose army clothes. But he has seen war, a slowly healing cut and several older scars in his face the evidence of shrapnel he was too slow to duck away from. His eyes are empty. He flinches whenever a car alarm goes off. With people dying all over the world, war has only intensified. Greg would have thought nations would work together now, but instead everyone has gotten territorial. They want to protect their own, and have all the recourses to do so. Currently the US is at war with twelve countries. Most, but not all, in the Middle East. The thirteenth gets announced that morning. 

“What five letters spell apocalypse,” Greg mutters under his breath while watching the newscast, and he isn’t surprised when Jeff, after a pause, answers, stiff and serious, “WWIII”. 

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1984-1991)

Greg doesn’t have any friends in high school. He’s too thin, short and way too smart to have anything even remotely in common with the jocks that run the place. If you would have told him then that he is going to end up in the army only a couple years later he would have laughed. He is sixteen when he graduates high school early, gets the hell out of the little cul-de-sac of San Francisco he grew up in, and goes to college. He majors in English lit, and gets his first boyfriend from the theatre club at seventeen. It only lasts a week, but it’s enough to convince him that he is sort of gay, or at the very least bi-sexual. 

At eighteen, he spends a year in London as an exchange student, and loses his virginity to a girl named Josie. She has brown, wavy hair, flashy red lips and a beatnik-lifestyle he admires. She is that artist, singer and actor bit of everything everyone seems to be around there. She squats in old buildings, supports herself by singing on street corners, and just generally seems so free. So happy. Greg hangs out with her enough to love her, but tries to fall in love and fails. She says she understands, comes to sleep in his bed when he’s in classes and introduces him to the art of thrift-store shopping. He doesn’t have sex with her again that year, but he kisses her frequently. It drives her boyfriends crazy. She drags him along to all sorts of performances, everything from boring, home-made poetry performed in discolored living rooms to orgies-as-art in high-brow museums. It’s in London that he takes his first improv workshop. 

At nineteen Greg is back in the US, misses Josie terribly, has started his own improv league to moderate success and acquired a stupid, fleeting crush on an Arabic language professor. The crush leaves him about as soon as he sees the man walk over the street looking lovingly at his wife and kid, but his interest in the language is peeked. It has a beautiful sort of symmetry that intrigues him, and he enrolls in “Modern Arabic” and “Arabic literature” over the summer. The next year the improv sort of gets away from him and he ends up performing on all sorts of campuses around California, and the Arabic does as well, because soon he is enrolling in Qur’an studies, and getting into the different dialects and politics of the region. 

He is twenty when his parents drop by on campus unannounced to surprise him, and find him in the middle of giving an enthusiastic blowjob to Tony, his dorm mate. Tony considers himself a Cuban revolutionist (despite being born to Irish-American parents in L.A.). He has long, stringy black hair and a shy grin. He’s not beautiful, but smart, with a razor-sharp wit. Greg doesn’t love him, really, but it doesn’t matter. His mother screams and curses him. His father says nothing, simply walks out. Both cut contact with him completely and leave him with over 50 grand in student debt and nothing to live on. 

When the army recruiter comes in to talk to them that week about opportunities, the adventure of becoming a translator in the army, losing all debt by giving just a couple of years, Greg is pissed enough to actually want to do it. Tony breaks it off as soon as he hears. 

So that is how, at twenty-one, Greg gets through basic training and is studying at an army base (no more literature, but bare-bones practical language for every possible situation, he has to admit he sort of likes it) for a couple months before getting relocated to fucking Texas. 

He is only on the base for a couple days before finding out about the improv, and when he goes to see the performance, standing in the very back of a crowded-like-hell place, holding a beer, he has to try not to smile too incredibly much because wow, the coincidence. Those guys are good. Playing familiar games, beautiful setups, he wants in the moment he sees that stage, hears the laughter, and by the next week he gets through to the Chaplain, and asks him for an audition. What he gets is a spot on the team, and three new friends. 

In time, Greg learns to enjoy the improv evenings in Texas even more than he did back in college, because here it’s no longer students trading fun for fun. These are hard, scarred men who have seen too much laughing their souls out for one hour every week, and it makes him feel something completely different. 

And of course, there’s Ryan. From that first game, the look on Ryan’s face when Greg cracked him up, he had known that he had to be careful. Real careful, because god, Ryan was so very much his type. He is constantly aware where Ryan is, a prickling in the back of his neck, a heat he can sense even when he isn’t looking at him. It is literally as if when Ryan walks by, his whole body wants to lean towards him, like a blazing fire in a freezing room. He knows the rhythm of his movements, how to copy them, how to play against him seamlessly, and just loves, loves to touch him. He knows that it is really obvious really fast that he _wants_ him, but Ryan himself either doesn’t seem to notice or particularly mind. 

Greg promises himself to keep it on the stage only, especially when he sees the wedding ring on the man’s finger and the picture of a smiling woman in his wallet, but it’s hard because Ryan, at least subconsciously, seems to seek him out wherever he goes as well. When Greg switches places at lunch to a different table, Ryan plants his tray of food next to him anyway, motions over to Drew and Mike to come along and seems perfectly unaware they are sitting in the middle of _the tank unit_. When Greg falters at shooting practice (and he isn’t that good, his eyesight nowhere near perfect even with glasses), Ryan is at his side, hand on his shoulder to steady him. When he trips and falls in the mud on a simple morning run, Ryan is there, strong arm under his armpit, to pick him up. And he wants to shout at the guy that while all that is amazing, really, it doesn’t quite help the huge, tumbling whirl of attraction he feels for him. Ryan probably thinks they are buddies. That he’s being a good friend, good soldier, and he is, that’s the whole fucking problem. Bit by bit, Ryan becomes the best friend Greg’s ever had, and still he can’t stop fantasizing about him naked, hard cock down his throat. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 1992)

Ryan is driving in a convoy over a dusty Middle-Eastern road. It’s February, and it’s cloudy, nearing dusk. There is one large truck with supplies in front of him, and two jeeps behind. Greg, who had talked his way into a transfer to their unit and in just a couple months has become a permanent fixture, is sitting by his side. They are arguing about a movie they saw last night, yelling to be heard over the wind. Greg thinks Tom Cruise is sort of interesting, in a short but rugged way. Ryan thinks he’s a horrible actor. 

They’re happy, laughing at each other, just doing their job. 

The next second all of it is gone. There is a sudden blast, a wave of sound so terrible it shakes Ryan’s bones and singes his eyebrows. It’s hot, too hot, the air is simmering with fire and the stink of gasoline. 

Ryan is resting with his knees on the sand with no idea of how he got there. The jeep is next to him, motor still running. 

His hands are shaking for some reason.

They are under attack, that is the first thing that slowly filters through his mind and he will never get used to this. The surge of adrenaline. The confusion, the white-hot flash of fear. Attack. The jeep that had been in front of them just a second ago is now reduced to shreds of burning debris lining the desert. There is a horrible ringing in his ears and he can’t tell if there are gunshots, if anyone in his unit is under fire because _he can’t hear_. 

Ryan has a moment of ‘oh god where is Greg,’ but he only has to turn his head to see Greg by his side. They were trained for this, of course. Greg is breathing hard, and looking at him strangely. It takes Ryan a moment to get it and then he has to slowly, finger per finger, force himself to let go of Greg’s wrist. His hand is aching, that’s how hard he had been holding on. He knows he has probably pulled Greg to safety. 

Greg’s mouth is moving, but Ryan can’t hear what he’s saying, and he’s not good enough at reading lips. The air is hazy and acrid with smoke. He shakes his head. He feels slow, as if he is moving under water. Greg’s eyes are opened wide in fear, but his hands are steady holding the P-90. Greg crawls carefully into the jeep and grabs the radio. He yells into it, mouth wide and angry. He doesn’t let go of his gun. Good. Greg seems perfectly fine, no blood, no nothing, so Ryan relaxes marginally. He points towards his ears, and shakes his head. Greg seems worried, Ryan can tell, but nods in understanding. His eyes are stinging. He knows they have to go, there is fire nearby, so he looks around their jeep, tries to locate the guys that were behind them through the smoke. He sees a flash of helmet. 

He pulls Greg’s sleeve, and, crawling over the ground, leads him there. His lungs feel as if they’re on fire, and he has to try hard not to cough. His eyes are watering now, blurring his vision. They find two other guys from their unit, one fine, one injured by the shrapnel. The four of them stay together until reinforcement arrives. The truck in front of them drove over a land mine. There are no survivors. 

Ryan avoids Greg’s gaze the entire way back to the camp. 

That evening in their barracks Ryan still can’t hear, there is a high whining in his ears now as if he is standing in a storm, or right next to the Niagara Falls. The doctor had communicated with him in writing, saying that it would pass. Despite that, Ryan still feels like crap. He is a genius in getting across what he wants by facial expression alone, but after a couple hours he is already tired of it. He feels sore over his entire body from the blast, and has a bursting headache. 

He is ready to swallow some painkillers and go to bed when he sees Greg walking by, obviously intent on going somewhere, and notices a flash of Greg’s wrist wrapped in white gauze partially hidden under the sleeve of his jacket. Ryan stands up, and sprints to intercept Greg, clumsily puts his hand on Greg’s arm to stop him. Greg seems surprised.

Ryan points towards Greg’s wrist and mouths, “How bad?” He doesn’t trust himself to speak very much, afraid it will come out too loud and he won’t know. Greg looks at him curiously. 

Ryan thinks that maybe he hadn’t understood him, so he asks again, paying attention to just whisper, “How bad?” 

He wants to say, ‘I’m sorry for gripping you so tight there.’ He wants to say, ‘I’m glad you weren’t hurt any worse.’ His own hand is still aching, and the white of the bandage is so bright, so shocking in comparison to Greg’s tanned hand. He briefly presses his fingertips to the bandage without thinking about it, and looks up. 

Greg seems flushed, and slowly, magnetically, licks his lips before mouthing “I’m okay, Ryan.” 

Ryan swallows. “Okay.” He feels unsteady, the headache, the shock still pushing him off-center, and he realizes he is leaning into Greg. He hurriedly takes a step back, and then figures he has nothing else to say. He smiles briefly and walks away. 

He doesn’t see that Greg watches him leave.

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

(Ryan, 2010)

Ryan refuses to end his tour of the missile silo without checking in on the sick, knowing full well that that little snippet of news will get around the facility within ten minutes. There is nothing there he hasn’t seen before, of course. They have improvised a sick bay out of what used to be the recreation room, several beds and tables close together, some closed off with white panels to hide those currently dying. He can hear their rattling coughs easily enough still, and the doctor, an older man wearing a spotless lab coat, looks up to nod at him but does not come closer or shake his hand. He was obviously reading something from a thick textbook, and speaks, annoyingly softly; “The men seem to think you are something of a godsend.” There is no bite in his words. He is simply stating the truth. 

Ryan steps closer and for once does not try to keep the tiredness from his voice. “You and I both know that’s not true.” 

The doctor looks up at that. His eyes are surprisingly young, and Ryan realizes that he had overestimated the man’s age. He is balding, the hair he has left going grey, but he can’t be much older than Ryan is himself. He seems healthy, Ryan notes, a double-check that he has learned to do with all of his medical personnel. Do they seem stressed? Overworked? Can they handle that fact that their patients are most likely going to die, quickly, without there being anything they can do about it? 

The man is staring back at him just as intently, and Ryan realizes he is asking himself the same questions about him. He supplies what he needs to know easily, a formality he has learned by heart by now. “No fever, no swollen glands, no chills or blurred vision, no coughing or wheezing, no muscle aches. Previous exposure in ’94.” 

The doctor does reach out his hand now, and says in that same strangely demure voice, “Colin Mochrie. Pleased to meet you Lieutenant.” 

Ryan grabs his hand and shakes it briefly. It feels dry and pleasant, grip just strong enough to suggest that, despite appearances, this is not a man who likes to be messed with. Ryan likes him already.

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1992) 

Greg signs himself up for additional language training. He can use it, yes, but mainly he does it because after a whole year he is still very inappropriately lusting after Ryan. Instead of getting better over time, which is what he had expected to happen, it only intensifies. It seems as if whenever he looks up, he can see Ryan’s eyes looking back at him. Trusting, caring. Ryan is close to Drew and Mike as well, obviously loves spending time with them, and Greg can’t tell whether he means just about the same to Ryan or not. 

One evening Greg gets left at the table with Clive across from him when the three of them wander off to go look at jeeps or something, and decides to get to know him better. Four rounds of beers later, he knows Clive was in law school first, but then changed his mind and enrolled in seminary, and ended up in the army through chance, as most of them did. That he’s been serving for eight years now, and even though he believes in a god, he tries not to get too specific about the denominations. Clive’s intelligent, darkly funny and has a surprising penchant for gossip. Greg instantly likes him. For the next week they stay behind and talk until the night guard comes to ask them to please go to sleep so she can lock up the room. Soon after that Greg falls into the habit of crashing at Clive’s office, drinking his (better than in the commissary) tea, eat his biscuits and generally inform him of everything that goes on in his life. He, out of necessity, dances around the topic of Ryan for a very long time, until one evening right after he’s signed up for the language training Clive asks him whether he’s doing it because of Ryan, and Greg doesn’t want to keep it to himself anymore. He says yes. 

Clive gets up, and locks the door. Greg is ready to tell him that, although he appreciates the offer, really, they shouldn’t, when Clive sits down and talks. He tells Greg quietly but with an edge of pride about his wife, and the man that’s both his and his wife’s boyfriend, and the three children they are raising together. Greg is sort of amazed and intrigued because he’d had absolutely no idea, _Clive_ of all people, and he comes out of that evening feeling much better than he has in a while. 

He says goodbye to everyone a couple weeks later. The entire unit will be on a mission to Sudan while Greg is at the defense language institute in California. It feels worse than he had imagined, to pack up his duffle bag, to throw his arms around Ryan, be held tight and slapped on the back, Ryan’s eyes glittering when he tells him to behave and learn well for them all even if only so that he can continue to talk them out of hairy situations. Greg promises he will, briefly hugs Drew and Mike, and saves Clive for last, thanks him one last time before stepping on the jeep that will drop him off at the airport. He waves goodbye to them, and feels a sharp tug in his chest when he sees the dot that he knows is Ryan grow smaller and smaller on the horizon until he can’t make him out any more. 

Six months isn’t that long, he tells himself, just long enough to get over this crazy longing, and maybe get himself another crush, one that is actually both gay and available this time. Once on campus he soon figures out where the gay bars within driving distance are, and he fucks his way through what feels like half of the male population of Monterey while keeping up his grades in the fast and heavy course of Dari. Greg sees Ryan’s face, or shoulders, or walk, nearly every day in some young soldier, a waiter in a restaurant, a seductively dancing man in a bar. He goes home with every single one of them that will have him. He cuts it close one time where a higher-up officer sees him leave a bar, and gets called in for a talk on how “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” also means “Don’t show or get caught showing it, ever,” and for a while he toys with the idea of coming out and letting the whole military fuck themselves. 

And then he gets the message that Drew is killed in action. 

Greg flies out to Texas with his iron-pressed dress uniform in a plastic bag, walkman blasting music in his ears and a hollow feeling eating up his stomach. Clive comes to pick him up at the airport and he sleeps in Clive’s guest room with a burly old cat curled around his feet that purrs like a tractor no matter how hard he twists and turns. In the morning he gets woken up by a child that looks absolutely nothing like Clive. 

Greg gingerly gets dressed, mindful of the little boy (“my name is Edmund and I’m seven”) currently sitting on his bed, and then makes his way down the stairs, haphazardly lined with piles of toys, only to get assaulted by two little girls. They cling to his legs, tell him their names (that he promptly forgets) and drag him to a paper-mache decorated chair. Clive is on the other end of the table, reading a newspaper, clearly amused but hiding it well. Greg says, “Er, well, it’s very nice to meet you too,” and shakes their tiny, sticky hands. 

A curly-haired woman balancing a coat, a cup of coffee, a bag and a set of keys rushes past, says, “Hello Greg, I’m so sorry but I have to run!” places a fast kiss on all of the kid’s cheeks, Clive’s head, then turns around the table and finds a tall, brown-haired man in an apron in the kitchen, kisses him on the mouth, and then runs out the door. 

Greg is still recovering when Clive says, “That’s Jane,” and one of the kids adds, “Our mom is a doctor!” 

The tall man wipes his hands on his apron, sticks one out to Greg and says, “I’m Stephen. Now who wants some pancakes?”

Greg eats very nice bunny-shaped pancakes (“You have to pour the syrup so that it’s like he has an eye,” one of the two girls tells him, expression deadly serious), has a chat with Stephen in between the children’s questions, and gets to see Clive smiling. It suits him. The kids call Clive dad, and Stephen daddy. They seem perfectly well adjusted and happy, and Greg catches Clive squeezing Stephen’s hand in thanks, briefly. It looks so natural that he can’t help but smile, too. Greg feels more instantly at home here than he ever has anywhere, and he makes Clive blush when he tells him that in the car later. 

The funeral is horrible, of course. Long, and too ceremonial for the kind of person Drew was. He would have preferred a good barbeque and a beer over the stiff, formal day any time, Greg thinks, and is surprised to hear Clive, giving the eulogy, says those exact words. He sees Ryan only from a distance at first, his wife holding his hand nearly the whole time. Ryan looks wrecked. Eyes red-rimmed, shoulders slumped. He pays attention to what Clive has to say, but then seems to tune out the rest. Greg feels his eyes on him a couple of times, and every time their eyes lock his heart jumps into his throat. He so badly wants to go over there and hug Ryan that by the time the mass is done his arms are actually physically sore from holding back. 

As soon as everyone gets up Ryan walks straight towards him, cutting a path through all the other mourners, his wife a step behind. Greg feels his breath still, but Ryan just grabs his hand, and instead of shaking it sort of clings to it, painfully, before letting go. So close up Greg can smell him. See the awkward way in which he wears the too-short uniform. See his face, tanned and worn-down by lines Greg knows weren’t there before. He looks like a man who has seen war. And instead of being glad of his decision to stay away, Greg is now cursing himself that he didn’t go along because he could have helped. He could have picked Ryan up when he needed it, and he wasn’t there. 

Ryan isn’t speaking, so Greg says awkwardly, “I have to fly back to California tonight, but I’ll be done in four weeks.” Ryan doesn’t respond. He seems to just want to stand there, looking at Greg. Greg is quite content to just look back. It’s a rest point between the busyness of the other people, the politely faked sadness, the meaningless platitudes. He could stand there all day with Ryan, and he is quite prepared to. But then Ryan’s wife’s suddenly appears, voice annoyingly loud when she says, “Well who’s this?” and Greg introduces himself. The moment is broken, and soon after Ryan lets her steer him away. He looks back briefly, and then he’s swallowed by the crowd. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 1993)

They are on stage again, better lights than two years earlier, but the same damn stage, the same damn guys watching them too, except Drew isn’t there anymore, his place empty and no one to replace him with. Ryan still looks over, after every good line, expecting to see Drew break down in giggles. Still listens for Drew’s snores at night, or saves up the best stories to tell him later. Still wakes up from nightmares where he feels the warm weight of Drew dying in his arms. 

Mike is on the stage with him, performing well as always, presence larger than life, and there’s Clive behind a table, always gentle, so patient in his comforting that Ryan sometimes hates him and sometimes wants to hug him and never does either. And there’s Greg, of course. Greg again. He had been gone for nearly six months and Ryan had missed him. Actively, deeply, some word deeper than simply missing. It wasn’t nearly the same as with Drew now, where he carries some sort of awareness of the man with him wherever he goes and he just simply forgets sometimes that he is gone. He had _ached_ because Greg wasn’t there. For six whole months every single second of every single day he had missed him. And he’s never realized before, that the time he pulled Greg to safety wasn’t simply because he was the closest by and it was a reflex. It wasn’t, because the time Drew had been closest by Ryan’s first thought had been ‘Greg!’ who wasn’t even in the fucking country, who was in some college studying another language, perfectly safe, and only then ‘Drew.’ And Drew is dead and Greg came to his funeral, looking perfectly fine and Ryan wanted to hold him and hit him and kill him and never let him go all at the same time and instead he had to hold his Pat’s hand. 

And now they’re back for the first time on the damn stage and Greg is the same as he always is, wildly inappropriate, sarcastic and articulate, and he’s flirting again, all night long, pressing, touching, turning in circles around Ryan, crossing the line in a million different ways. They are in a scene together and suddenly Greg’s angling for a kiss, tension built up so that Ryan hardly can say no, the audience loud and happy and expecting. And suddenly, Ryan feels pure, insane anger thrumming though his chest. He turns away from Greg, pushes him off none too lightly and says, “No!” loud and serious enough to be understood. Enough to shift the mood in the barracks from easy going belly-laughs to a rustle of unease. They can tell he means it. He breathes, deeply. Most of all he wants to deck Greg right here. But he doesn’t. Greg has his hands raised, and is looking at him with a flicker of fear on his face. Ryan doesn’t even want to know what he looks like to make Greg be afraid. He focuses on breathing again. 

A couple seconds pass. “I’m in love with Cathrina,” he says, weakly. It’s a cop-out and not even remotely funny. A couple people laugh. 

“All right,” Greg says, obviously unsure about what to say. He opens his mouth again, but Clive intervenes and rings the bell to indicate the scene is over. Ryan startles. People clap, and Ryan leaves as much space as possible between Greg and himself when he walks off the stage, his steps stiff. 

Mike takes the next game, and then Greg with Mike, and then Clive, two games too early, calls it a night. Ryan still has his fists clenched tight, heart beating rapidly and he doesn’t even know what’s wrong. Why now, when he sat through the entire funeral without feeling anything. Why now when everything is fine and they are just on base and they aren’t even fighting, or on a mission. He escapes before the others have finished taking their bows, walks at a near-run to the dorm and then, reconsidering, the toilets. He is planning to scream or maybe punch a wall or something once he’s there, get it out of his system. 

He’s reached the outer door, steps into the hallway that leads to the toilets when suddenly Greg is coming up behind him. He’s obviously run fast to catch up, he’s breathing hard, and he’s saying, “Ryan, hey, Ryan…” and something constricts in Ryan’s chest, anger, annoyance, the fact that Greg had the nerve to come after him, and he turns around and hits Greg square in the face. He pulls his punch a little but he still feels a crunch of bone. His hand hurts and he’s retracted it, standing in defensive position, ready to hit again without even blinking his eyes. 

Greg’s hand comes up to shield his nose. “Fuck!” He looks at Ryan with a stunned expression, and says slowly, as if he has to pull himself together to remember what it was anyway, “Look, I’m sorry I took it too far, I know you didn’t want to,” and then adds, tone decidedly more pissed off, “but you didn’t need to hit me Stiles, are you fucking insane?” 

And Ryan drops his fists. “I’m married,” he says, his voice sounding strange to his own ears. “I have a kid.” 

Greg nods, “I know that.” There is blood on his hand, and he looks at it briefly before looking at Ryan again. There is a blood drop dangling from his left nostril. 

“I love Pat,” Ryan says, somehow, now that he has opened his mouth, unable to stop it. He can’t feel his legs. His head feels too heavy, as if it is ready to explode. His arms and back and all of him is shaking. 

“Of course,” Greg says hesitantly, taking a step closer. Ryan is so terrified that he is going to try and touch him that he immediately takes a violent step back, and his shoulder blades hit the wall with a heavy thump. He is breathing hard. ‘But why then do I miss you more,’ he thinks. He’s glad that the wall is there because by now his legs feel as if they can’t hold him anymore and he briefly wonders whether he’s having a panic attack. Greg’s nose is starting to swell, Ryan can see. He probably broke it. He feels sorry for it now, deeply sorry, and in some strange kind of trance, as if it’s not even his own hand but someone in a movie, watches his own hand reach out and touch Greg’s face. Greg only flinches away briefly before allowing him. 

The hallway is brightly lit with zooming TL-lamps and he can see a reflection of himself in Greg’s glasses. Greg’s cheek feels hot and rough under his fingertips. He slides them to the edge of Greg’s neck, where his hair is soft. Greg is shorter than him. It hurts so much, Ryan wants to tell him. This touching and wanting and endless waiting and never having. So much. 

He can hear a strange sound come out of his own throat, somewhere between an inhale and a sob. He launches himself forward, gets his whole hand in Greg’s neck and presses his face to Greg’s. It isn’t even precise, his lips smash somewhere to the left of Greg’s mouth, and it’s way too tense, he just holds on tight, his whole body locked up. He searches with his lips until they’re on top of Greg’s and then there is an anxious, too still-moment where every muscle in his body is taunt and Greg is gripping him back hard as well, to pull him closer of push him off Ryan doesn’t know, it’s just forceful, hands mashed into his jacket and holding painfully tight. Neither of them is doing anything. 

Then Greg shudders and exhales, his mouth opening a tiny little bit, and Ryan snakes his tongue inside and they’re kissing, pushing their faces even closer and bodies together and hands so tight, so tight it still hurts. 

It only lasts a couple seconds, Ryan tastes an edge of copper blood and hot spit and a hard, punishing tongue before both of them are pulling away, breathing quickly, hands in each other’s hair, lower bodies mashed together, chests heaving in and out in tandem. 

Ryan knows that he should say something like “I’m sorry,” but he can’t bring himself to say it. He isn’t sorry. A moment passes. Greg looks up at him and relaxes visibly, gets ready to say something, make some excuse or even joke, maybe. He is going to let go. Ryan panics at the thought and grabs him, turns them around so that Greg’s back is against the wall and kisses him again, longer, harder. Greg groans or moans, he isn’t sure, he doesn’t care, he just needs to taste, he needs to, he wants to, he has to have him now… His dick is rock-hard and it’s that sudden realization that has him step back and let go. 

He can feel an embarrassed heat slam through him, he is trembling, and Greg, Greg looks awful. His nose is red and swollen, blood still trickling out of it, some drops have landed on his jacket but mostly they’re smeared across his cheeks. His lips are bright red as well, his glasses slightly askew. He’s breathing heavily, and then licks his lips. Ryan can’t read his eyes. 

Ryan suddenly feels nauseous when the reality of that image hits him. He has assaulted a fellow officer. He has… He turns on his heels and runs out of there, letting the door fly open behind him, and vaguely he can hear Greg call “Ryan!” but he doesn’t listen, just runs towards the track and the bushes lining it.

He dry-heaves a couple times. He can taste bile but nothing else will come up. After a minute or two he goes to the water fountain, tries to drink the ice cold water and then spits in back out, splatters it over his hands and his burning cheeks where he thinks there must be blood, and then stands there, shuddering. He sinks down to sit on the dirt, head between his knees. He can’t even remember what Greg’s kiss felt like. He didn’t enjoy it. He just… took. He feels immensely stupid. 

He knows he’s going to get suspended for this. Dishonorable discharge possibly, if they see the kiss as sexual assault. Twice. Two kisses. 

The night is cold. He gives himself exactly fifteen minutes, counts them off on his watch, while he tries to regulate his breaths. Thinks of what to say. What will happen. That Greg will never look him in the eye again. Then rises and walks towards base. He needs to report himself to their commanding officer. 

By the time Ryan gets there Mike is already in there, and Clive is waiting in the hallway for him. In a way, he isn’t even surprised. They are highly drilled to look after each other, after all. Ryan winces inwardly, but walks up to Clive. He wants to know. “How bad?” He asks, and Clive replies immediately “Probably broken, but they won’t know for sure until after the x-ray, we’ll go to the hospital.” And then, “He says he provoked you. That it wasn’t your fault.” 

The meaning of that only slowly muddles through Ryan’s thoughts. “What? Why?” 

Clive shrugs. “Both Mike and I backed up the story. He obviously annoyed you enough on stage. It’s his own fault he went looking for you.” 

“No, I…” Ryan protests, and at that moment the door opens, and Mike comes out. Ryan goes in prepared to accept whatever they throw at him, and it ends up being very little. One week suspension, starting immediately. 

That night he lies in bed next to Pat. He doesn’t explain why he is home, suddenly. She doesn’t ask.

He doesn’t sleep at all.

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

(Ryan, 2010)

Ryan goes to see the missile, the one they’re supposed to guard. It’s huge, several stories high, color a dull grey. There’s a large red button on a console. 

He meets some other young soldiers in the mess. He talks to them, pretends to be interested, and does his best to remember only their names. Anything more is foolhardy in a situation where he knows none will come out alive. There’s Major Chip Esten, technically his second in command. Jonathan, a young and eager private. Colin, the doctor, is the only one who received the vaccine, years ago. Most are too young to have been infected back in the nineties, back when this was just an illness and not a death sentence. 

Some blame god. Others blame progress, the unrestricted use of antibiotics, allowing this virus to mutate every time it’s attacked until it can’t be stopped by anything they have any more. 

Ryan figures he shouldn’t blame anyone. 

He wishes he would have run out when he was sick all those years ago. Straight out of the hospital. Kissed every girl he saw on the street, every man. With tongue. Done a round of everyone he cared about, coughed in their faces, stuck his germ-infected fingers into their mouths, told them that he loved them and that he’s saving them. 

He wants to go back and save them all. 

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1993)

Greg is blaming himself. He knows he caused this by pushing for a kiss on stage. Part of him had known that Ryan would try to get out of it, or, if he didn’t, it still would have been only a close-mouthed stage-kiss, but he had selfishly wanted it anyway. Part of it was Ryan himself, who was so quiet and closed off these days he felt like the only way he could reach him was to prod at his defenses until he gave in. Greg hadn’t known that it would make Ryan angry. Although he should have, he tells himself. He has played the game too long. In a way he wants the anger, wants to be told off before Ryan hides behind his calm façade again because it isn’t right, not even remotely, to lust after your best friend for months. He wants to be punished for it.

He still hadn’t been prepared for a direct hit to the face, and it damn well hurt; Ryan packs a mean punch. Ryan left him with his nose a throbbing mess, hands shaking, lips raw and tasting of blood, and, goddamnit, a sliver of hope. 

Greg does the only thing he can think of. He goes to find Clive. Clive, who does not ask him for an explanation, just makes it all go away. Clive, who sits in the army hospital hallway with him at three am in the morning, waiting for the x-rays to be done, and simply hands him a magazine. 

Clive, who feeds him painkillers and tucks him into a base guest room bed and tells him that it will all be better in the morning. The man deserves a medal. 

Of course it isn’t better in the morning, Greg’s nose is swollen so badly he can’t breathe through it, he has a pounding headache and the realization that Ryan has both hit him and kissed him and somehow, when he imagined this (and he _had_ imagined it of course, countless times) those two facts were usually reversed. Ryan teasing him back, kissing him in some stolen moment, and then turning around, hitting him in the face and calling him an idiot, a traitor, a cocksucker. Greg usually isn’t very kind to himself in those fantasies. 

But strangely, he does not feel ashamed. Besides the pain he feels lighter, somehow. Afraid, yes. But he’s not sorry he kissed back. And very, very intrigued by the side of Ryan he had seen. Because that was not a man who just kissed a friend for fun. Ryan wanted him, had apparently agonized over him, and that thought makes him want more. Oh yes, he knows it can’t be anything long-term. He knows. 

But god, it’s so much better to know that he’s actually wanted too. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 1993)

Ryan’s week at home passes by torturously slow. He fixes the broken sink. He drives to a hardware store to buy a new garden hose. He plays with his daughter, holds her hands while she cautiously, clumsily takes her first steps. He throws her in the air and she squeals with delight, again and again, until his arms are sore. He doesn’t even feel like her father. He never did. She is the child he plays with until she gets hungry, or sleepy, or cries, and gives her back to her mom. He doesn’t even know how to bathe her. What she eats. What her favorite toys are. He wasn’t there, when Pat found out she was pregnant. Flew in when the baby was born and left again a week later. Her first word was “daddy,” aimed at a picture of him, Pat had told him proudly over a gravely phone line. She still calls the picture daddy, but not him. Pat seems to be ashamed of that fact, apologizing profusely. Ryan is fine with it. 

He feels absent the whole time he is there, doesn’t touch Pat once during the day even though on the second night she presses close and kisses him, strokes him, wants him to make love to her. He does it, comes inside of her, but he doesn’t feel anything. He’s sure she must notice, but she says nothing, besides that she is happy to have him home. An hour before he has to leave he takes a shower and roughly jerks himself off, keeping his mind a careful blank. He does not want to get hard around Greg again. He cannot. 

Truth is, Ryan had known for a very long time that he wanted something from Greg. To protect, keep safe, keep around, always, that was fine. Normal. But he can, off the top of his head and with astonishing detail, recall what Greg’s nails look like. The crook of his elbow. The back of his neck. The edge between his t-shirt and pants. He can hear Greg’s voice in his head at any time, making some sarcastic remark, a joke, the softer tone he takes when he’s very serious about something. He knows the man’s favorite foods, and opinions about just about anything. He’s caught himself trying to wind him up by proclaiming to love something he knows Greg hates, just to hear him go off on a tangent. He has been aware for a long time that there is too much there. It’s too intense. 

He had never before imagined it would end with his hands holding the back of Greg’s neck and his tongue in his mouth though, dick throbbing between his legs. No. 

He knows that if they are going to work together ever again, (and there is a possibility that Greg won’t want to, that he has already asked for a transfer), that he will need to apologize. So that is what he is mentally working on when he kisses his wife and kid goodbye and drives back to base. He’s never been a great liar, so he’s not going to say anything about the why. He’s just going to say he is sorry that he hit Greg, and that he gives his word that nothing like that will happen ever again. Ever, ever again. 

And he has a vague inkling that perhaps this wasn’t the first time Greg had kissed a man, he does. Greg had kissed back, or at least allowed him to. He had held on just as much as Ryan had. Greg always flirted mercilessly on stage, but never off, not with any woman or man Ryan had ever heard of. Always seemed to react strongly to whatever touch from Ryan (and he knew, as he had unwillingly remembered every single one of them). So maybe… But he stomps on that thought immediately. He doesn’t know why Greg didn’t rat him out, but he can only assume it is because of their friendship. Or, of course, because no man would like to admit that he was kissed by a fellow soldier against his will. Ryan sighs and drives on.

Once at the base, he gets stuck with paper work. Another visit with his commanding officer (“Have you cooled off, Stiles?” “Yes, sir.”) and he gets to choose between seeing the base therapist, or talking to Clive. He chooses Clive without a thought, and only later, when he is walking towards the man’s little office to see him and make an appointment, realizes that maybe he shouldn’t have. Because for all of Clive’s kindness, he has been in their unit for longer than Ryan has and is surprisingly sharp. He was there, in Sudan. Ryan has seen him kill men as well, only when absolutely necessary but with a cold efficiently that amazed him at the time. He’ll never underestimate him again. Ryan had even confided in him once, late night, beer in hand, that he missed Greg. Clive had never said anything, but he knew, and he had probably already put two and two together. 

Ryan knocks on the beige door that reads “Lieutenant Clive Anderson, Chaplain,” opens the door to the familiar office and startles. Greg is sitting in the chair across Clive. 

Clive looks at him evenly, gets up, and says, “Now you two, talk.” He gives Ryan a pointed look and passes him by. 

Ryan closes the door behind him feeling somewhat like an idiot. Greg looks mostly unharmed. His nose looks straight enough, although there are purplish bruises along both sides of his nose and cheekbones. He’s looking at him openly, as if he’s simply glad to see him again. 

Ryan looks away. There is a faded poster of dancing children above Clive’s desk. An aquarium in the corner that holds two very bored-looking goldfish and a little plastic diver that waves up and down in the current. Greg rises from his seat and stands to face Ryan. Ryan thinks of his speech. Sorry, never ever again, etc. He opens his mouth to say the words, and at the same time Greg takes a step closer and reaches out his hand to trail over Ryan’s cheek. 

Ryan promptly forgets what he was going to say, instead is startled into feeling. 

Greg’s hand. 

He is aware that his eyes are darting everywhere, to the paper work of Clive’s desk, the calendar that shows today’s date, the drawn blinds on the only window. 

“Ryan,” Greg says softly. 

Ryan closes his eyes because he can’t stand to look at Greg, not when just one touch feels so intensely physical his entire body seems to want to lean into it. Greg’s fingers trail back and forth over his cheek, and then derail to lie over his lips. Ryan can feel every groove in them, the touch like burning. He holds his breath when Greg leans closer, and slowly, ‘giving me lots of time to turn away,’ Ryan thinks, bridges the gap and touches his lips to his.

It’s small, just a faint press of lips and then they are gone, but Ryan’s hand sneaks out and weaves itself into Greg’s jacket, makes a fist and holds him there. His eyes are still closed. He can feel the shadow of Greg’s breath on his face. He warningly says, “Greg,” while he opens them, surprised at how close by Greg really is. Close enough to blur his face to the most important parts, his eyes and lips, fade out all the reasons why he shouldn’t do this. Ryan’s hand isn’t letting go. Instead he gives in to the want, just then, just once more, pulls on Greg’s jacket, hard, and captures his lips. Greg seems surprised, a faint, disbelieving sound, and then he is right there with him, wrapping his arms around him, accepting him into his mouth and then asking for more, holding on while kissing hard. When they break apart they both have to catch their breath, foreheads touching. 

Ryan tries to clear his head, lets his hand relax the fist and lays it flat on Greg’s chest. He can feel the rapid thump of his heart. Greg looks up at him with equal hope and resignation in his eyes. ‘He wants this,’ Ryan thinks with a jolt, the mere avalanche of possibilities that brings along with it frightening and huge. ‘But he’s expecting to get told off.’ And he knows he should. He should say no but he wants too and he would miss him anyway, if he would tell Greg to go now. He would miss and ache and be without, for months and years and he doesn’t think he’s good enough of a man to do that to himself. Not anymore. 

So Ryan says, voice surprisingly normal, “I hate this.” He’s planning on following that up with why, and how he wants Greg but doesn’t want to want him and some sort of explanation of things he doesn’t even understand himself. But Greg snorts at that and punches him on the shoulder, hard enough to hurt, the other hand holding on and pulling him close again and whispers in his ear “I can make you love it, Stiles, believe me,” and Ryan shudders before leaning in to kiss him again.

And then it turns dirty, fast. 

Suddenly Greg is kissing as if this is going to be the one and only time he is ever going to get to do it, wide-open, urgent, dirty, sloppy kisses. His hands are over the short spikes of Ryan’s hair and slide down to the curve of his shoulders, his lower back, his ass, then up and down again, as if they can’t decide where to go first, grip opening and closing in time with his thrusts, both tongue and hips, overpowering, incredibly good. Ryan’s whole body feels overwhelmed, drunk on so much touch at once. He has never been kissed like this before, where he simply has to give in because his partner is _that_ hungry for him. Every touch he gives Greg, every thrust he returns causes Greg to moan, he is so very much into this and Ryan is almost afraid at how much he likes that. He wants to encourage Greg, he wants to feel him fall apart all around him, and that’s why he lets his hands decidedly go to Greg’s ass and pulls him close. And oh, the heat and hardness of Greg’s dick is so very obvious against his leg, even through several layers of fabric, and the really great thing is that his own dick literally _twitches_ at that. He hadn’t known that that would be the feeling that makes him actually see stars with lust, but god, it is. 

Ryan groans and moans and rubs against Greg, somewhere in the back of his mind hoping that if they keep this up long enough he will get to rub against Greg and feel him shudder while he comes. Greg seems to have similar thoughts because suddenly he stops and says “Can I suck you? Ryan, please, can I…” with such want in his eyes that Ryan (if he would have had any resistance left at that point), could never have said no, so he says “Fuck, of course,” somewhat surprised at the sheer longing in his voice. 

He lets Greg go and fumbles at his belt, and Greg tries to help, trembling fingers colliding, sliding, dancing together. Ryan is going insane with want but Greg doesn’t seem to be doing any better, sinking down on his knees, nuzzling Ryan’s underwear before he gets it out of the way, dick springing out eagerly. And Ryan remembers being ashamed of this at one time in his life but after today he never will be again because Greg’s eyes are wide and he licks his lips and looks radiant with pleasure at the mere sight before putting his lips around the head and sucking. 

Ryan’s world seems to tilt for a moment as it registers that that warm tongue, delicious suction is Greg, and then Greg closes his eyes and moans around his dick, as if it tastes amazing or something. Ryan instantly realizes that he needs to be leaning against a wall at the very least because his legs are going to buckle any time now, so he shifts towards the desk, places his naked ass on some paperwork while Greg stubbornly follows him, mouth open, eyes closed, as if he wants more and more and more. Once Ryan is seated he sucks him in with a dirty sounding noise, all the way to the base. 

Greg looks up like that at Ryan, deliberately takes Ryan’s hand, and puts it on the back of his head. Ryan pulls in a sharp breath at that and gives him a careful thrust, but Greg only pulls his hand harder, always pushy, so Ryan carefully thrusts harder, and harder, his hips moving back and forth, amazed that he isn’t choking Greg and that he is even allowed to do this. Greg’s other hand has moved up to his thigh and he puts his own hand over it, intertwines their fingers at the sudden rise of his orgasm. He knows he is going to come down Greg’s throat and that idea sends him over the edge so quickly he feels as if he gets punched by his orgasm, so strong it’s on the edge between pure pleasure and pain, Greg sucking him in even deeper, eagerly, again and again until he has to push him off because it’s too much. 

Greg rises unsteadily, and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. His lips are red and glossy and Ryan kisses him again, winces a little at the taste of his own come still on Greg’s lips but he’s not ready for this rush to end. His hand goes towards Greg’s belt, and Greg slaps it off, opens his own as quickly as possible and then Ryan wraps his hand around Greg’s dick, velvet hot and hard. He starts jerking Greg off, twists his hand movement the way he likes it on himself and then just repeats it, somewhere in the back of his mind afraid that he’s too clumsy and inexperienced to build a good rhythm. He’s just thinking about what else to do, whether he even wants to go down on his knees himself, when Greg says “fuck, fuck, fuck,” into his ear, shudders, and Ryan speeds up his movement while Greg comes hotly all over his hand. 

Even after Greg’s done and obviously sensitive now Ryan lets his fingers trail through the come. The feeling is so dirtily sensual that he can’t help it. Eventually Greg looks up at him, eyes glazed, face flushed, and quirks an eyebrow, so Ryan with some regret lets go of Greg’s dick. His hand is covered with come. He raises it up, and glances at it, briefly. He’s not quite sure whether to wipe that on his pants, and the thought must have shown on his face because Greg snorts and steps over to the desk to hand him a box of Kleenex. Ryan accepts them, wipes the worst of it, and then looks around again. No sink in the room. His dick and pubes feel sticky with slowly drying spit and come. His hand looks fine, but feels grimy. Greg, way ahead of him, takes a couple tissues, folds them together and dips them in the aquarium. He shrugs. Ryan laughs and does the same. They’ve washed up with worse on missions.

Ryan feels self-conscious, now, cleaning up. The water is cold but his dick is bravely remaining half-hard, too impressed to quite go down yet. He has to push it down when he struggles back into his underwear. Greg is still looking at him from the corner of his eyes as if he can’t quite believe his luck that this ever happened, and as if he is weary Ryan is going to hit him again. ‘He thinks I’m going to pretend this never happened,’ Ryan thinks. He has to admit the idea seems both ridiculous (because he is going to remember this for the rest of his life) and the only way to deal with this right now. He fumbles with his pants, then wads the dirty tissues into his pocket, straightens his collar, runs his hand through his hair. Greg is completely dressed. Ryan realizes he’s stalling. 

He takes a breath. “Um…” He’s never been good at this. Talking. Greg gives him that slow, too-vulnerable look again. Ryan lets the silence hang between them. He really doesn’t know what to say. Some kind of pump starts up in the fish tank. It zooms softly. 

“You’re married,” Greg supplies. “You want me to leave you the fuck alone now.” He sounds resigned. As if he had known it all along that this would be a one-time deal. Ryan supposes he had. 

“I am.” Ryan agrees slowly. And then, before the courage completely fails him, lets his eyes and voice reveal what he knows is right there, beneath the surface “But don’t… Greg…” He takes a breath and settles on, “Don’t transfer from the unit.” 

Greg looks surprised. “I won’t.”

 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

 

 

(Ryan, 2010)

There are movies playing in the mess hall every night. They only have a limited number, so they’re on rotation, and most of the crew there can recite the lines to every single one. Ryan hasn’t seen Top Gun since the eighties, so he goes to watch it with the others. He still thinks Tom Cruise is an awful actor. He catches Chip and Jonathan act out some of the scenes later, they’re cracking themselves up and they’re not great, but good enough. And he’s tired, too tired to do this shit. But these people are bored as hell, they need a laugh, and suddenly he knows how to give it to them. 

Ryan walks over, and they jump to attention so quickly he sort of hates the fact that he is the important one now. The officer. He asks, “Have you ever done improv?” They shake their heads. 

And then, “Would you like to?”

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1993)

Clive had warned him not to, but he’d done it anyway. Touch Ryan. Greg had wanted it, waited for it and now he has it, he feels as if it should have been the beginning instead of the end. There is so much more he still wants to do. He curses himself every time some fantasy image of Ryan enters his brain. Ryan’s mouth on his dick. Ryan on all fours. Ryan smiling and sated in bed next to him. He had one shot at it (of that he’s sure) and what they did was amazing, but not enough. Not even close. 

Ryan asked him not to transfer and so Greg’s not going to (even though he has been playing with the idea for a while), but he’s well aware that it’s never going to be the same again either. He sinks into something grey, uncaring, and when they suddenly get presented with a month of freedom before the next mission he calls Josie. He needs to get over this man. She offers her couch and he takes it, flies out to London on the next flight. 

Josie coddles and fusses over him and it’s as if he is eighteen again and had never even thought about holding a gun. Eighteen, and his biggest worry in the world was whether Josie’s lipstick was going to stain his lips, and who to buy drinks for that night. They go out dancing, drink outrageously, buy Greg clothes that he is never going to be allowed to wear in a hundred mile radius of anything army-related, but mainly sit around at home nursing hangovers and drinking a lot of tea. 

Josie still considers herself to be an artist but she does have a part-time job as a cashier at Tesco’s to pay the bills. She shares a run-down apartment with three roommates: Caroline, a short, optimistic and spit-fire type of girl, Steve, he’s huge, has dark bushy eyebrows and speaks in such a heavy accent Greg only understands half of what he says, and Jim, who has blonde curls, a sweet smile and never says anything. Caroline is a self-identified feminist and lesbian that has a string of girlfriends, but she still occasionally fucks Steve as well, Josie tells him. She thinks Jim is either gay or asexual. Steve is straight and hopelessly in love with Caroline, even though he must know that it’s a lost cause by now. 

The four of them have started an improv group together and are trying to get a decent venue. Greg is immediately jealous when he sees them perform. This could have been his life if he didn’t go to a prestigious college, acquire a huge debt and join the army to pay it off. He could have never met Ryan, held down a menial job, stayed out all night, focused on comedy, dancing, drinking, fucking. It sounds like heaven. 

Josie stays deliberately vague on the topic of her own love life, and Greg fills her in on his only bit by bit. He doesn’t have a picture of Ryan, not even a single one, so he is stuck trying to describe him. They go see a play that night, and Josie grabs his hand somewhere through it. Greg doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry anymore either, so he threads his fingers with hers gratefully. He has sex with her afterwards and it’s good, slow and careful. He makes her come twice. She’s beautiful. 

Steve smokes acrid-smelling, self rolled cigarettes that stink up the whole apartment, and the day before Greg leaves he asks Steve to teach him how. He wants to take something with him to Afghanistan that’s all London, and Steve gifts him a lighter and tobacco. Josie holds him and tells him to never feel lonely, that he has a home in London if he ever wants it. Greg believes her. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 1994)

After that day in Clive’s office Ryan makes a point out of avoiding Greg. It is rather easy to stay out of each other’s way on base and Greg obviously doesn’t want to talk to him either, until their unit gets assigned to a four-month tour of Afghanistan. Greg looks at him immediately when they hear the order, probably trying to assess whether Ryan still actually wants him in the unit. So Ryan nods, briefly. The next time he sees Greg, two days later, he is sniping and whining to Clive about going to Afghanistan without knowing a word of Pashto. And the fucking genius of the military of sending him as a translator when, oh yes, he only knows one of the two damn languages. Ryan suppresses a smile. 

Then there’s a full month of leave before the mission and Ryan’s home with Pat again. And instead of feeling absolutely nothing about what happened with Greg, he feels waves of guilt. Or, at unguarded moments and much more vicious, spikes of lust. He welcomes the guilt, accepts it gratefully because he knows that it is what he is supposed to feel. But the lust is what makes him get up at five am every day to jog around the block. Makes him hit the wall behind their garden shed until his knuckles are bloody.

Some part of him wonders if this whole thing has happened simply because he feels estranged from Pat. He’s gone from sleeping next to her every night to seeing her only a matter of weeks out of the year. He’s seen it happen with many other guys before, they have a wife at home and a sweetheart at every other deployment site. And the thing is, it isn’t even remotely Pat’s fault. She simply can’t understand. Will never know, what it feels like to feel someone die in your arms. What it is like to go into a fight with your friends at your side. What it means to suffer and strive and cheer together, day in day out. She is never going to be Greg. 

But she is his wife, the one he should care for the most, the one he genuinely loves. So Ryan tries to make it up to her in spades. For the entire month he goes out of his way to be kind, helpful and generous. He learns how to rock the baby to sleep. How to work the dishwasher. He cooks her a chili (her favorite, she claims, but then she drinks suspicious amounts of beer to wash it down). He goes down on her every night, until she pushes him away and tells him to give it a rest. She, ever sweet but this time completely wrong, attributes it to his upcoming deployment. She cries and says that she is scared something will happen to him too. He holds her, and she holds their daughter, and Ryan knows that he should feel something warm and amazing at that. Instead as the days go on, he increasingly feels like an actor performing a well-rehearsed role. A cheat. 

He said goodbye to both of them in the airbase airport, and celebrates his 25th birthday somewhere over the Atlantic during a fifteen-hour plane ride. He passes the time playing cards with Mike and a brand new addition to the team, Private Richard Vranch, a quiet man but supposedly a brilliant sniper. Who has also brought a guitar, and offers to play them any song they can name. Mike immediately wonders about adding some music under his singing, Ryan can see it working too and they spent the rest of the flight together, talking improv, music, betting the night away. The whole time Greg is on the other end of the plane, seated next to Clive, carefully not talking to any of them. Although at exactly midnight Texas time he looks up at him. And Ryan feels ridiculously touched that he even remembers. 

After a grueling ten-hour jeep ride they arrive to a small, secluded base in central Afghanistan. There has been some political unrest in the country, a fundamentalist group called the Taliban. Usually in those desert climates it gets hot enough to die of heatstroke during the day and cold enough to kill you with hypothermia at night, but this time it’s just extremely hot and humid day and night. 

Ryan drinks as much water as his body can hold and still feels as if there is never enough because he simply sweats it out again. His armor and uniform aren’t made for this, sweat trickling down from between folds and creases as soon as he does anything strenuous. There are twelve guys sleeping in one tent and one rumbling ventilator and it’s hell trying to sleep, endlessly twisting and turning, looking for relief from the heat that never comes. Ryan’s field bed is separated by maybe four feet from Greg’s and it’s torture. 

A week in on the Afghanistan mission, the combination of lack of sleep and uncomfortable heat has everyone irritated, and tempers are flaring. And for some reason they are settling on Richard to fuck with. Richard is a good sniper, but still so very green and unsure that Ryan wants to tell him to just _man up_ , keep your head down, act like all of us do, all of that bullshit his own father had said to him when he was younger. Mike, who Richard obviously likes, is off to all kinds of projects and rarely around their base. So Richard’s shoes go missing. His backpack loaded with rocks. He finds himself without any water in the desert. Nothing too dangerous, but fucking annoying anyway. 

Ryan, after pulling Richard out of an argument (or more accurately, a lead-up to a beating) for the third time in as many days, tells him to follow him and sits him down on a table across from Clive and Greg. He introduces them matter-of-factly, “Clive Anderson, Chaplain, also MC,” and “Greg Proops, our translator,” and then points towards Richard, “Richard Vranch, Mike wants him to play the guitar with us.” And steps away. He can see Clive look at Richard without surprise; everyone knows that he’s new in the unit. And then curtly ask him a question. 

Ryan is pleased to know he was right as he sees Richard talk eagerly to both Greg and Clive for the rest of the meal. 

Clive approaches him the next day while he is lifting weights, alone in the tent as it is fucking five hundred degrees out and anyone with an ounce of sense is somewhere with a fan. Ryan, however, is firmly in the mood for some self-punishment. Even though he still feels sort of silly lifting weights, he needs it. His frame isn’t generally suited to muscle. Sprinting, yes, lifting, no. So he is lying on the bench, pressing weights, practically defenseless when Clive is suddenly standing over him. “Nice thing you did for Richard.” 

“Hmm,” Ryan grunts. 

He has been trying to avoid Clive because he is still convinced that he knows, somehow. Either Greg told him, which is a distinct possibility because he’s seen those two gossiping over tea like old ladies, or he figured it out for himself. “He’ll get used to the men, and they’ll start picking on the next guy. But of course, you know that.” 

Ryan doesn’t answer, and tries to press the weight again. His shirt is just flooded with sweat. The leather bench cover uncomfortably sticky. His muscles are burning. He doesn’t know how long he’s been out here. 

“I’m more worried about you.” Clive says, forehead lined into a frown. 

“I’m fine,” Ryan says, and tries to press the weight again to underline his words. His arms tremble, and it sinks down. Clive intervenes and pushes it back into the rests for him. Ryan sighs, and then slowly rises. His head feels sort of painfully heavy, as if he has a hang-over. He would like to stand up, but doesn’t quite trust himself to make it without stumbling, so he just sits there, and waits it out. 

Clive hands him a lukewarm half-liter water bottle. Ryan unscrews the top and drinks from it greedily. And yes, there it comes- “You told me last year that you missed Greg,” Clive says. Ryan drinks on. No use in denying it. No reason to agree with it, either. 

“I believe he might be missing you as much right now.” Ryan drinks a couple more swallows, lets the bottle sit on his lap and screws the cap back on carefully before handing it back to Clive. 

He likes Clive, and he is well aware that the man is trying to help, but damn, he’s not in the mood to be patronized. If it was up to him he would be with Greg right now. Laughing, hanging out, doing whatever. Or, truthfully, much more than that. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. 

Clive eyes him carefully. “What if I do?” 

Ryan takes a deep breath. Clive probably does know. “Then you know that there’s nothing to be done.” 

 

But Clive’s talk does change Ryan’s resolve to completely avoid Greg. He can handle feeling like shit because he got himself into this, because he owes it to Pat, somehow, to suffer. But the truth is, it isn’t as bad as it would be when Greg isn’t around. Now he can watch him, still. His treacherous mind still fantasizes. He jerks off at night when he can see Greg’s profile, face shimmering with sweat, and hear him sigh in his dreams. And that’s probably more than he deserves, but Greg doesn’t deserve any of it. And Ryan can’t see, anymore, how admitting it changes anything. It won’t make him love Pat any more. 

So when after dinner he sees Greg walk outside, he follows him. The light is blinding, Ryan has to shield his eyes to see where he’s going, and then runs a bit to catch up. Greg must be aware that he’s being followed, but says nothing. The sun is setting orange, the desert sand simmering with heat. It’s at least a hundred degrees out still. Greg stops at the back of one of the tents, and sits down, back leaning on the stretched green canvas. He pulls up his knees. Ryan lets himself sag down next to him. His arms hurt like hell, and he curses himself for overdoing it to such a degree. If he’d had to do ten push-ups right now he probably couldn’t do it. The tent feels hot on his back. The ground is dusty. 

Greg takes a battered pack of tobacco and papers out of his side leg pocket, and slowly starts rolling a cigarette. Ryan watches his fingers roll and push. Then the quick flick of his tongue as he licks the paper closed. There’s a large prey bird flying overhead, circling the base. Probably hunting small animals coming out at sunset. Ryan can hear its cry. 

It’s only when Greg takes out a lighter and lights the cigarette that Ryan asks, “You smoke now?” Greg hadn’t before, as far as he knows. In fact, Greg is a bit of a health-freak compared to the Texas-born soldiers, actually eating salad and fruits. Ryan had always thought that that was his California background showing. The cigarette smoke dances softly into the air. Greg takes a drag and coughs dryly, once. Not such a great smoker then. 

“It seemed like the thing to do, you know.” Greg looks at Ryan briefly. “Went to London, did some coke, fucked a couple hookers.” 

Ryan feels astonished. “Really?”

“No,” Greg snorts, and taps the ashes to the ground somewhere near his boots. 

Ryan laughs, and looks at the dying sun. It’s a giant orange ball now, slowly disappearing into the earth. He sticks out his hand. “Give me some of that.” 

Greg rummages through his pocket and does, their fingers touching briefly when he hands over the packet. Ryan has to hide the shiver that runs through him. Instead he focuses on rolling himself a cigarette. He has grown up watching his father doing the exact same thing. Yellowed fingers, rough and scarred from a lifetime working in the factory, showing him how to roll it expertly, it’s probably one of the earliest memories he has of his father. He’d tried it for himself the first time when he was eleven, and got the belt for it. His cigarette is much more even than Greg’s. Greg is watching him. “You’ve done that before.” 

“Yeah, and I’m not a smoker either.” Ryan says and lights up. It feels rough, punishingly good, smoke flirting against his tongue and stinging his lungs. He inhales deeply, and exhales against the now purple sky. The heat seems to be coming from the ground itself now, and there is not a whisper of wind in the air. A cricket, or some local variant anyway, chirps loudly somewhere close by. 

Greg shifts uneasily. Ryan’s arm muscles burn when he guides his cigarette to his mouth and takes another drag, breathes it out slowly, decides what the fuck he is trying to say. It’s his fault, that’s what he needs to say. “It was me.” He eyes Greg, tries to gauge his reaction. “It was me who started it, me who wanted it.” Some ashes separate and float towards his t-shirt. ‘Me who still wants it,’ he mentally adds, and those words feel heavy on his mind, bounce around his skull like bowling balls until he opens his mouth and pushes them out quietly: “Me who still wants it.” 

Greg’s cigarette is nearly burning his fingers, but he doesn’t seem to notice, sits unnaturally still, eyes fixed on the edge of desert and sky. The air is darkening, purple fading into blue. Ryan can see the blink of an early star. Greg takes an audible breath, and says sarcastically, “Is that a declaration of love or something, Stiles?” before looking at him. 

Ryan feels flooded with relief. This is good. Familiar. He knows that tone from Greg and prefers it so much more over the hurt one. So he says easily, “No, but it’s all you’re gonna get,” and Greg laughs harshly. 

A different animal flies by this time. Maybe a bat, Ryan thinks. He slowly rises, and hands Greg back the lighter, tobacco and papers. Greg takes them, and looks at him, maybe a little disappointed that he’s going, but Ryan wants to leave before he can’t help but kiss him again. 

It’s nearly completely dark now. Ryan walks away.

 

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

 

(Ryan, 2010)

Chip, Jonathan and Wayne are performing for the whole crew of the missile silo. Ryan himself doesn’t join. “I can’t,” he says, when he is asked. It’s enough to know that he can teach now. It’s enough to see the soldiers smile and forget about everything else for a while. Colin, their doctor, comes out to watch as well, and Ryan can see him flush and then laugh with their hijinks. 

Ryan is perplexed when Colin shows up the next night and asks whether he can join them. Apparently he has done some improv in college. He turns out to be absolutely amazing. He has a bizarre, physical, conceptual sense of humor that is so out-of-the-box Ryan can’t help but wish he would have known the man sooner. They could have played off each other wonderfully back in the days of the Saturday night barrack performances back in Texas. It seems like a different life now, but for some reason, Ryan has no trouble imagining Colin in it. 

Even now, though much more amateuristic and on a smaller scale, improv does a lot for the morale. It facilitates friendships. It gives the men something to look forward to. And it also makes it even more devastating when someone falls away. 

Jonathan ends up in Colin’s infirmary in a matter of weeks and dies quickly, quietly. Chip catches it almost directly afterwards and fights for a whole week before giving in. He comes to see one last show in a mask and hazmat suit. He gives them a thumbs up. 

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1994)

Greg feels worn out. It’s not as if a month in London really got him over Ryan, quite the opposite really. He should feel ecstatic right now that Ryan seems to want more, and he is. But he’s sure that Ryan hasn’t really thought it through. They are going to have amazing sex. It’s going to be fucking wonderful. Until one day, they get caught and their careers are over. Or Ryan wakes up one morning and realizes that he does have a family that loves him. A little girl that doesn’t want a man that sleeps with other men for a father. A wife that has done nothing wrong. And then, he’s going to hate Greg for every second they have shared. Every good thing turned sour. 

And Greg doesn’t want to cause that. Worse, he doesn’t know how he can’t when he wants it this much. 

He sits on the ground, leaning on that tent for what feels like a very long time. His ass grows numb, legs stiff. Stars flicker brightly; the moon appears round and beautiful. The one cricket gets joined by what sounds like a dozen more and they give him a concert. Other soldiers walk by, into the tent, out. He can follow snatches of their conversations. Eventually the camp falls still, and Greg is still sitting there. He clumsily rolls another cigarette, and wonders what the hell he is doing. 

Eventually he gets up and takes a scalding hot shower. He uses the spicy soap he bought at the market while trying to make friends with the locals (best way to do that in a country like this is to haggle for something cheap. It’s not the price that matters. It’s the process, involving lots of talking, insincere smiles and little hot glasses of mint tea that burn his fingers). The soap is a solid block of dark green and smells absurdly strong and deep, earthy. Greg likes it. He stands in the clouds of steam for a long time, lets them billow out around him until he feels like he can’t breathe anymore. 

By the time he goes to bed most of the others have been sleeping for hours. Someone in their tent is snoring heavily enough to be heard over the ventilator. Greg doesn’t pause long enough to figure out who. He slaloms between the cots and carefully sits down on his own. He pulls off his boots, strips down to his underwear, runs his hand through his still-damp hair and takes his glasses off. Then stretches out on his bed, and turns to his side so he is facing Ryan. Ryan’s eyes are glittering spots of black. Of course he’s awake. Greg raises his hand at Ryan, briefly, and Ryan does the same. The ventilator rumbles on. Familiar. 

Greg feels on the crest of something, the edge of a cliff he’s about to step over fully knowing the crash is going to hurt. Of course it is. But the alternative is to stand there the next so many years, wondering what it would have been like to have jumped. So he scoots to lie on the edge of his cot, and reaches out his hand, slowly. He can almost but not quite reach Ryan that way, but Ryan sees him, and, somewhat hesitantly, shifts his own position so that Greg’s fingers briefly touch his chest and then presses his own fingers to Greg’s. 

Greg looks around. He’s quite sure that when their hands connect in the dark space between their beds there is no one who can see them. As far as he can see in the relative dark everyone around them is lying still, apparently asleep. The ventilator makes enough noise to cover up the sounds of the shift of fabric, the creaking of a bed. He himself can make out Ryan’s general shape, the lighter-than-shadows expanse of skin, but not his expression. Ryan’s hand tightens in his, then skims to run his fingers over Greg’s questioningly, dip in every crevice between finger and hand. Greg knows what he’s asking. Ryan’s hands are sweating, and so are Greg’s, and they slide together slowly, certain patches rough with calluses for both of them. Greg pulls Ryan’s hand, and Ryan’s arm, longer than Greg’s, reaches over without much difficulty. He slides his fingers all the way to the sensitive inside of Ryan’s elbow. The skin is soft, ridged and sweaty there. He can tell that Ryan is watching their surroundings as well. Can anyone see? He took his glasses off earlier, so he isn’t sure whether Ryan has better night vision. He’s going to trust that he has. 

Apparently satisfied that truly no one can see them, he can feel Ryan relaxing, and then shudder, as Greg lightly uses his nails to trace Ryan’s lower arm. Ryan shifts even closer, and now he can reach his upper arm, warm skin going over to his shoulder, his hairy armpit, where Ryan derails him, takes his hand and puts it to his lips. Oh. Greg has to remind himself to breathe when Ryan very, very slowly opens his lips and lets the tip of Greg’s middle finger inside. 

He hadn’t expected this, somehow. The gentleness. Greg can feel the sticky, dry edge of Ryan’s cracked lips and behind them a smooth, slick warmth. His dick is getting way too interested in this and he has to shift a bit on the bed, lets his knees fall apart slightly. He wonders whether they’re crazy. He wonders whether Ryan is going to change his mind again after this. 

Ryan’s lips open up slightly more, and there’s a hesitant trace of his tongue shifting over Greg’s finger, warm and lush. Greg can feel the heat of it pull a sheen of sweat from his freshly washed skin. The air is hot and stilted, despite the ventilator. His skin feels overly sensitive, heartbeat in overdrive. He shivers. Ryan, apparently able to tell that he likes it, does it again, and then loosely sucks in Greg’s finger deeper. Greg stifles a curse. 

He can feel Ryan’s hand tremble slightly, and squeezes it encouragingly with his remaining fingers. Ryan takes his finger in again, wet and surer now, and Greg, greedy, presses a second one to Ryan’s lips. Ryan without hesitation opens his mouth and lets it slide in deeply. Greg’s whole body is leaning towards him, dick straining the fabric of his underpants now. God, to be in that mouth. He curls his fingers in Ryan’s mouth and feels the edge of his teeth. Ryan bites his fingers playfully, and then licks it better, worrying them with his tongue. Greg uses his remaining hand to briefly press against his erection. All right, he wants this. Consequences be damned. 

Ryan, maybe having seen his motion, he’s not sure, opens his mouth, lets Greg’s fingers escape and uses his hand to guide them down. They catch on the edge of Ryan’s bottom lip, then trail wet spit over Ryan’s chin, the long line of his roughly shaved neck, his skinny chest, the hard outline of ribs beneath, and then catch on a nipple. Greg touches it, rolls it between his thumb and index finger into hardness. He can feel Ryan’s hot exhale ghost over his hand. 

Greg settles his own hand steadily over his erection now, squeezes it rhythmically. 

He wants to feel the other nipple but Ryan pulls his hand further down over a soft belly, scattered with hairs, that trembles under Greg’s touch. And then to the elastic of his boxers. Ryan lets his hand go, seemingly used up all of his courage, but Greg doesn’t need any more of an invitation. He wants this. He immediately touches the cotton fabric of Ryan’s underpants and feels Ryan’s erection rising to meet him. Hot and heavy, strong in his hand, faint moist spot at the tip. Greg gets his fingers around it though the fabric of Ryan’s boxer shorts, and strokes it, fingers feeling every ridge. Then trails lower, to the warmth between Ryan’s legs, his balls, lets his hand move over them and then up again, following Ryan’s erection from base to tip, squeezing it lightly, manipulating it against the fabric. 

Ryan doesn’t make a sound but his reaction is clear, hips pressing into Greg’s hand. Greg gets his fingers to the tip of Ryan’s dick, and rubs his thumb over the rough fabric holding it there, at every pass-through feeling the fabric slide easier over the leaking head. He feels light-headed, his own hips moving back and forth, rubbing himself off nearly unnoticed compared to the feeling of Ryan in his hand like that. He wishes he could see more. Or that he could taste Ryan again. But the feeling is so good, intoxicating, he goes back down to the base, and presses up, twists his hand while he goes, and now Ryan’s erection is actually pushing the elastic of his pants up from his stomach. Ryan stills his hand with a soft squeeze, and lifts up his hips, pulls the elastic over his dick and takes it off. 

Greg takes advantage of the moment to do the same, frees his aching dick, lowers his underpants, leaves them hanging on one leg and completely opens his legs. There is a thin blanket bunched behind his back, and he takes it and drapes it over his ass. If someone uses a flash light, they won’t be able to see. Ryan is looking over at him, and copies him, drapes the blanket over his legs but leaves his dick bare. 

Greg reaches out again and feels the warm crinkle of Ryan’s pubic hair, meets his hand that is lying sedately over his hip, and takes his dick, bare now, in his hand again. Ryan’s skin is so very smooth and warm under his hand, it feels wonderful under his fingers. Ryan is incredibly responsive, leaning, shifting, straining for Greg’s hand. Greg, even though he hates to, tries to divide his attention between Ryan and the rest of the tent. The snoring had stopped some time ago. Does that mean, whoever that was, is awake? Are they making any sound? How visible is his back-and-forth hand movement between Ryan’s legs? While Ryan’s dick slides between his fingers it’s obvious that he isn’t going to last very much longer. Greg can hear the edge of a moan and deliberately pumps him harder, tightens his grip, adds a swipe over the sensitive head, and yes, right there. He repeats the movement, and Ryan’s hand reaches out to hold his wrist. It squeezes tight while his other hand is over his mouth now, keeping any sound in while his hips move off the bed and he comes in Greg’s hand, slippery, warm, several spurts coating both Greg’s hand as Ryan’s stomach and upper legs. Ryan sags back, and Greg can hear him breathe rapidly. Good. 

Greg, feeling as if he is about to explode with want himself, angles his lower body towards Ryan and uses his come-covered hand on himself. It’s immediately amazing and he’s not going to last long at all, feels the burning edge of an orgasm building up already. He can’t tell if Ryan can see what he’s doing, he registers Ryan moving but is so focused on the bright pleasure flashing though him that he doesn’t quite notice that Ryan lowers himself down to sit on his knees on the floor. He _does_ notice when suddenly Ryan’s face is near his crotch and Ryan’s warm mouth _licking_ his dick while he’s still using his hand on it and he comes pretty much instantly the sensation registers. Probably all over Ryan’s face, and even though he can’t see, he can’t help but enjoy the thought. He can feel Ryan pulling away, and just lays there, his heart hammering away in his chest. 

Ryan takes a minute too, and then Greg can see from the corner of his eye Ryan’s form rummage for some things, if he had to guess he would think towel, and then leave the tent. Greg has to stifle his laughter and bites the back of his hand. He came all over Ryan’s face. Amazing. 

Greg gives Ryan a five minute lead, lies as still as possible, listening to whether any one is awake, anyone saw. He notices nothing, so eventually he slips back into his clothes, makes a face at the feeling of drying come all over himself and his hands, and leaves the tent. The moon is full and bright. The air is still exotically hot, there isn’t anything approaching a breeze. He runs into four guys on night guard duty, and nods at them. He hopes he doesn’t smell too obviously like sex. The lights in the bathroom block are on. He walks to a sink and looks in the mirror over it. Under the neon-brightness he doesn’t look too hot. Bright red spots on his cheeks in a just-had-sex flush. Dark shadows under his eyes. The rest of his face a yellowish tint. He splashes some water in his face and starts washing his hands. He startles briefly when one of the toilets flushes, but it is Ryan (of course) who steps out of the stall. He doesn’t look that put-together either, his face red and obviously freshly scrubbed. His hair is wet as well. He slowly grins at Greg though, and Greg grins back. Yeah. After cleaning up they both walk back to their tent together, easily in step, and fall asleep quickly. 

When Greg wakes up in the morning with a start his eyes are gravelly with lack of sleep, voice rough, but he feels… good. 

They tentatively settle into a rhythm after that. They stretch the sex thing, try to make it as many days as possible without giving in and then, when it becomes unbearable, have quick, dirty, mind-blowing orgasms rutting together in supply closets, toilet stalls, one memorable occasion in the middle of the night in the wide open desert. Ryan learns how to give a blowjob, but they don’t go beyond that because getting caught is a very real possibility and there is never enough time. But they sit close, shoulder to shoulder while Greg tries to translate the local newspaper, something about a flu epidemic, or Ryan traces routes on a map. They go for morning runs together, take latrine duty, help out in the kitchen, go back to being inseparable. 

And okay, they kiss. Quickly, behind some dunes while out in the field. More languid over the steaming pots of boiling water in the kitchen. And Greg feels fine letting it grow stronger, more risky, better, occasionally catches himself smiling when he looks at Ryan. He’s glad for every single touch he gets. 

Their four months in Afghanistan pass by relatively action-free. Mike returns, and they hold an impromptu performance one warm night. Richard figures out his place within the unit, refrains from getting beat up any further and plays his guitar for them all night. They don’t lose anyone this time, not even a serious injury, and morale is high. 

They arrive back in Texas in the early morning of a boiling hot August. As always, there are friends and family lined up as they step through the gates. Greg, hating himself while doing it, seeks out Pat along with Ryan. He finds her in a bright summer dress, looking beautiful, daughter in her arm, and with a slight… belly. Ryan, one step ahead of Greg, falters, and Greg has to push him forward to get him going again. Ryan, as if in slow motion, walks up to her, hugs her, she cries, and when he asks about her belly she nods, and Greg can just make out the word “surprise,” from where he is standing, rooted to the ground, and thinks nothing but “Fuck.” 

Ryan does look at him, briefly, when he accepts his daughter in to his arms (she doesn’t want to be held, struggling, het little face bright red and mouth open in a cry), his eyes wide. Greg returns the look and shakily walks away.

 

 

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

 

 

(Ryan, 2011)

Ryan is sitting on the silo floor, back against a console, Colin at his side. The red button is blinking above their heads. He bounces a rubber ball to the wall and back. They’ve been brainstorming on different improv games to try, and Colin plays idly with his ring while thinking. Ryan has seen him do it often, it’s a nervous habit of sorts, but he has never asked. “Are you married?” 

“Deb,” Colin says, slowly. “She died.”

Ryan nods, of course. But Colin contradicts him, “No, breast cancer actually, two years ago.” 

Ryan says, “Oh,” and throws the ball to the wall with more force than is necessary. It slaps his palm when he catches it. It’s hard to remember sometimes, that there are other diseases still out there that are equally deadly. 

Colin turns to him with a serious expression and says, “Ryan…” 

Ryan squeezes the ball, rolls it between his stinging fingers. He knows what he is going to say. Colin has tried to subtly warn him many times. He’s shown him where to find the emergency canned food, vitamins, antibiotics. Last night there were detailed instructions on how to open the hatch, written by the former lieutenant, left on his bed. Colin doesn’t expect to live, which is strange for a man who should. 

“You never took the vaccine,” Ryan says. He came to that conclusion a couple weeks ago. There is no other explanation. 

“No.” Colin smiles, sad and bright at the same time. “They gave me only one, you know. One doze. And I couldn’t… I mean, I was already nearing forty. It seemed wrong.” 

Ryan looks at him. 

“I injected my son with it.” Colin says. He sounds proud. “When Deb found out she was so angry, she wouldn’t talk to me for weeks.”

“But it worked? He’s immune?” Ryan asks. He could have died. So many died after the vaccinations. 

“It did,” Colin says. “He’s sixteen now.”

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 1994)

In those months in Afghanistan Ryan played with the idea of telling Pat that they weren’t meant for each other. That they got married too young (of that he’s sure). That he’s gone too often, too absorbed with the military to make a good father. That she deserves better. He tiredly puts all of that away now. 

Instead he tells Pat that he would have liked to have known that she was planning on another baby. That he should have had a say in it. And that he thinks two will be more than enough. She placates him by agreeing, softly stroking the growing curve of her middle. 

And the thing is, he does love her. He wants her to be happy. He finds it easier to be around their daughter now that she is getting bigger, no longer that too-fragile thing he’s too afraid of to hold. He pretend-plays with her, engages her with stuffed animals and dolls and she gets over her fear of him. He gets to feel the baby kicking in Pat’s belly this time. Goes along for an ultrasound where they find out it’s a boy. Ryan immediately wants to name him after Drew but, knowing that Drew himself would have hated him for passing on his much-teased-with name, accepts Pat’s idea of naming him Sam after her father. 

They start performing again on their usual Saturday nights with the permanent addition of Richard, and Ryan enjoys the ease and excitement of being on stage immensely, feels grounded in it. 

But being closer to Pat and realizing the impossibility of everything he’s doing with Greg all over again ironically makes him less inclined to leave it alone. He’s quite sure that he’s a horrible person, to have sex with his pregnant wife and think of Greg while he’s doing it. To drive straight from waking up with her to the base and get a flash of excitement from seeing Greg’s smirk. And he knows they have been incredibly lucky not to get caught kissing in the hallway, that first time. Or in Clive’s office. Or after his swim practice, just last week (Greg’s hushed whispers, Ryan’s broken “Fuck!” when Greg palms his dick through his Speedos, frantic kissing, rubbing, suddenly stilled when someone enters the dressing room and calls for Greg.) Ryan still flushes when he thinks of that day. 

Greg will suck his cock any time he asks him to, and that is enough to make Ryan want it whenever he thinks of it. And he thinks of it embarrassingly often. During tactics meetings. During drills. While eating in the field, across from Greg. Mike laughs at him and says, “Whatever you’re thinking of right now, I bet it’s better than these MRE’s!” and Ryan admits that yes, it is, with a greasy grin. That always shut them up fast. 

With all that going on, he sort of neglects to really keep an eye on the world news besides what he picks up from others, until Greg passes him another newspaper, an American one this time, and says “The end of days is coming soon.” 

Ryan glances at the main story. It says, “Flu pandemic kills another, more to come?” Beneath it there is something about President Clinton, and the stock exchange. Also, Madonna has a new hit. He shrugs, “Somehow, I’m not worried.” And gets back to rolling a cigarette, first one for Greg, then one for himself. 

A couple weeks later, the base installs a decontamination chamber, just in case. They all laugh with it. The only people that have actually died from this flu thing in the US are some old folks in Oregon and an undertaker in Alabama. To everyone else with a remotely decent immune system who catches it, it’s just a virus, so they’re pretty safe. Pat makes him wash his hands anyway when he comes home before he’s allowed to touch either her or Mackenzie. Ryan thinks she’s being a little silly but complies. 

A couple months later, the old, weak or sick start dying of it left and right. The media is still blowing it up out of proportion. Ryan has a blast making fun of it on stage. 

And of course, that’s when he catches it himself. 

 

It’s early December and they are out on a short training mission, hiking, giant forest, Ryan usually loves those. Even more so because by using the small, easily portable two-man tents, these are the missions where he gets to literally sleep with Greg. On this particular one, where an icy rain turns into a weak, immediately melting snow, soaking their boots and clothes and putting out their fires, Ryan isn’t the only one shivering by the end of the day. He already had a cough before leaving, and in that weather it turns it into a stinging, painful wheeze fast. He can’t seem to get warm, so he cuddles up with Greg that night, practically inserts himself into Greg’s sleeping bag (Greg squeals at the feel of his icy hands against his stomach, but then rubs them warm for him) and wakes up with bright red cheeks, a pounding headache and a hacking cough. He fights on through the second day, dragging his feet through the slurry of mud and rain, enjoying the chill of cold spots of ice on his fevered, bare face. By that night he gratefully accepts a painkiller from their team medic, but keeps himself (and by extension, Greg) up all night coughing, in turns shivering so hard his teeth clatter loudly, and sweating so much he soaks through his shirt. 

Ryan’s had the flu a couple of times in his life, but he’s sure he has never felt this miserable. The medic examines him in the morning, and forbids him from going any further. In truth, he’s kind of relieved. He has a high fever, shivers, muscle aches, pounding headache, the whole damn shebang. He has to say goodbye through a quick, weak wave to Greg, and hike out to the road where there will be a jeep waiting for him. The medic refuses to let him go alone, and secretly Ryan is glad because he feels so woozy he isn’t sure he can walk in a straight line any more, let alone navigate a forest. In his next coughing fit, he coughs up blood. 

He’s too far gone to see the worry lining the medic’s face, but he can hear his tone when he talks into his walkie talkie, urging the men to come and find them. It’s none too late, because thirty minutes later Ryan passes out in a small, mossy clearing. Sometime later he is vaguely aware of being transported. He briefly thinks of the quarantine protocols they had to learn. Wonders whether they’ll put him through the decontamination chamber. Then someone with latex gloves is unzipping his pants and there’s a sharp pinch into his buttock, and the world fades away into comforting black. 

He wakes up three days later coughing himself awake, gasping for breath and panicking before he realizes he is in a hospital (stark white walls, ceiling and bedding, tubes running from his hand to bags of fluid, a monitor beeping along with his heart rate). And that Greg is in a bed next to him, vomiting loudly into a red plastic bucket. When he notices Ryan’s stare Greg gives him the finger while another retch hits him. Ryan wheezes and then coughs again, but he feels much, much better knowing Greg is right there next to him and still capable of sarcasm. 

He finds out later that he managed to cultivate a nice case of pneumonia on top of the virus, and that they were quite worried for him. That Greg showed early symptoms when the army decided to evacuate the whole unit, and therefore was treated much sooner and to greater effect (the vomiting being not the worst sign). Ryan is still incredibly out of it, and is often only awake for a couple minutes at a time. Because of the contagion risk he isn’t allowed any visitors, even the doctors are wearing masks and gloves at all times. Greg sleeps nearly as much as he himself does, but he doesn’t have the energy to mind. 

It takes a full week before Ryan is strong enough to keep up a phone conversation, and talks to Pat himself instead of listening to her worried voice through the receiver while some nurse holds it up to his ear. She is eight months pregnant now, and the doctors won’t even allow her to come to the hospital and see him from across the room. She is going crazy with worry and he tries his best to reassure her, at the same time conscious of Greg nearby, listening. 

Once he starts being able to focus better he has a lot of fun provoking Greg into rants about the food, the needles, the ridiculous safety precautions, the hardness of their beds, anything he can think of. Sometimes he wonders whether Greg complains simply because he knows Ryan likes it. They don’t get up to anything remotely sexual together despite being in the same room, but Ryan doesn’t particularly mind because he feels like absolute crap, every muscle in his body sore and weak. And it’s not as if he gets in the mood from hearing Greg dry-heave, or seeing a glimpse of Greg’s pale ass and hairy legs when the back of his gown opens up on his way to the bathroom. Then Greg complains about that too, Ryan laughs, and he knows that he’ll be kissing him soon again anyway. 

They perfect the dubbing game, put the TV on some Mexican channel that airs telenovella’s all day long, and spend hours coming up with long and intricate plots that grow stranger and stranger by the day. 

Then Greg gets discharged, and Clive comes to pick him up, the requisite white mask covering most of his face just in case. He says hi to Ryan but is careful to stay at least a couple feet away from him at all times, and excuses himself profusely, saying “It’s for the kids, my wife would kill me if I got sick.” And Ryan is shocked because even after several years of serving with Clive he had no idea the man had children or a wife. Somehow, he’d always thought of him as single. Greg seems not surprised by the news at all, of course, and then he is all alone. 

Ryan immediately starts nagging the nurses to let him leave, too. He gets a new roommate who vomits even more that Greg ever did, and who demands the remote of their TV to watch the news coverage of the virus. He is in hell. 

Greg has a house on base now, and dutifully calls Ryan several times a day from his sofa. Greg’s TV doesn’t have the Mexican channel, so they time their phone calls so Ryan can steal the remote back during the more popular American soaps. Greg gets frighteningly good at predicting the storylines. When Ryan realizes they won’t let him go home to Pat for at least another week, he asks whether he could be released to go anywhere else, thinking of Greg’s place, and feels ecstatic when they actually agree. He can’t infect Greg all over again, and as long as they stay away from the general population and rest he should recover just as well there. Pat agrees because she can tell he is really sick of the hospital and drops a duffel bag of his clothes and toiletries on Greg’s doorstep. 

And that’s how Ryan gets wheeled in a wheelchair to Greg’s door by some stern-looking male nurse. They spend a lot of time watching old movies and just about everything Greg has on videotape (a disturbing amount of it several-hour long Arabic movies from the seventies that include singing and dancing). Greg rediscovers a love of reading, and speeds through several thick novels. Ryan naps a lot. 

They spend entire days on the sofa together under a mountain of blankets, let their socked feet bump into each other and legs tangle together in increasingly strange combinations. Every night they argue about which take-out to order. Ryan finds it frighteningly domestic and is afraid that this is the moment he is finally going to tire of Greg, but he doesn’t, not at all. Sometimes they don’t speak for hours, the living room completely quiet but the sound of Greg flipping pages, and Ryan watches him absent-mindedly while dozing. 

Greg only has one bedroom with a two-person bed in it and they sleep together without either of them feeling strange about it. They are so used to each other that Ryan finds the sound of Greg’s breathing at night a comfort he finds hard to sleep without. So when Pat calls and asks him where he’s sleeping then he doesn’t quite think to lie and says “with Greg,” while Greg suddenly looks at him with startled eyes. “There’s two beds,” Ryan lies quickly. Pat doesn’t hear anything wrong in his voice, and starts talking about the nursery she is painting blue for Sam. 

That night, Greg takes off his sweats and Ryan does too, and they rub together naked, try to tease a response from their recovering bodies. It works just fine, and by the end of it Ryan is sweating and deliciously sticky and they get to do something they have never done before: actually enjoy the afterglow. Greg carefully pillows his head on Ryan’s chest and Ryan threads his fingers through Greg’s short hair, plays with his ear, feels the stubble on his jaw. It’s nice. 

The next day, one moment they’re watching a movie and the next they’re kissing. They crush the remote between them, change the channel to a grey haze and neither of them notices. They take it upstairs, and Greg opens his nightstand to show a handful of condoms and lube. Ryan slowly, carefully, with the afternoon light streaming through the blinds, lets Greg show him how to fuck him. It’s absolutely amazing, to feel his dick sink into Greg’s tight heat, to see Greg’s face, hold him, to laugh together when he does something stupid (and yes, he does, he feels nervous as if it’s his very first time all over again, dropping the lube, messing up the condom, hands shaking until Greg presses soft kisses to them). Ryan hadn’t been sure he wanted to do this, before, and Greg had never asked, and it’s way out of his comfort zone and scarily intense, but it’s great. They fit. 

Ryan bravely offers to take a turn when they’re both hard again, sort of enjoys the feeling of Greg’s fingers stretching him but then it also reminds him of taking a dump and he doesn’t find that particularly exciting. He tells Greg, who agrees, jokes about it and then Ryan’s cracking up while _Greg’s finger is in his ass_. It’s a wonderful day in a very bizarre kind of way, and Ryan lays awake that night stuck somewhere between wonder that he can do this now and absolute terror because he has no idea how this became his life. 

Greg gets quiet a couple hours before he is scheduled to leave, and Ryan doesn’t know how to fix it. He kisses him goodbye, wishing he could stay. And then within thirty minutes he is home again, feeling as if it’s a shadow of himself he barely knows how to slip in to. He is a soldier, husband and father, and then he is whoever he is when he is with Greg, when they are alone, when they are silly and stupid and passionate and it’s easy. He spends Christmas with a still highly pregnant Pat, and then New Year, just waiting.

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1995-1996)

Sam is born a good ten days late on a cold Monday morning. Greg knows because he gets a call from Ryan at six am to tell him. Greg wants nothing to do with that kid, prefers not to think about it, but still he’s in his car a couple minutes later, driving to the hospital. Because Ryan sounded horrible. 

Greg finds Ryan on the spot where all the proud parents, grandparents, the happy people should be, looking through the glass separating him from the room of newborns. Greg goes to stand next to him, leans his shoulder into Ryan’s. Ryan smells like antiseptic, sweat and cheap cigarettes. His voice sounds scratchy when he says, “I can’t remember holding Mackenzie after she was born, or changing a diaper, a bottle, nothing.” He looks scared out of his mind.

They both stare at the baby that has “Sam Stiles” written in sharpie on its crib. It’s bright red and crying. The hospital is busy around them, people passing in the hallway, snatches of conversations, the occasional sharp beep of electronics. 

“You must have at one point,” Greg says logically. They’d had plenty of leave. There’s a nurse walking past the bassinets now. She lifts a baby out of its bed and disappears with it. 

“Yeah, I just don’t remember,” Ryan says, and when he looks at him he just seems so sad Greg can’t help himself. 

“You can make sure to remember it this time,” Greg says, a little weary of himself saying those words.

Ryan doesn’t reply. 

 

As the year drags on the flu does as well, and half the base falls out sick at one time or another. As a result, their unit gets delayed much longer than it usually does, and they stay on base until the summer. Then they do a three month stint in Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo which turns out to be quite the luxury compared to the Middle Eastern camps they’re used to. There is even a Burger King right there on base, and it ends up feeling like one long, be it boring, Balkan holiday. 

By the time they return though, there is big news. Their unit will no longer be stationed in Texas, they’re moving to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Greg is immediately sure he will miss the Texas base, their stage, the grounds, every place where so much has happened, but they’ve been lucky to have been in one spot for so long. Ryan claims not to care, but Greg can tell that he’s lying. 

Clive grumbles as well when he has to dismantle his office. He leaves his faded posters behind for whoever gets the place next, but takes the goldfish. 

In all, not that much changes. Mike gets promoted, and doesn’t go on missions any more, simply coordinates from base. They all, especially Richard, miss him terribly. Greg knows that they’re up for another mission in the Middle East soon and he’s right, Saudi Arabia, and a couple months after that, Afghanistan again, and then another year has passed. Ryan’s son can walk and talk. His daughter is enrolled in preschool. Greg knows, because he lives a mere three streets away from them. They try to be careful, don’t touch on base often, so when he hears the next mission is going to be Iraq, Greg is quite happy. He shouldn’t have been.

 

 

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

 

 

(Greg, 2011)

Greg spends months with Jeff in Kabul, grows to trust him. He doesn’t see him happy though, doesn’t ever expect him to be, which is why it is such a good surprise when one morning Jeff walks up to them and something is different. His steps are larger. His gaze more sure. He raises his voice, and declares to their camp at large, tone flat, “The president has repealed ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ this morning.” 

Greg takes a second to let it sink in. His papers drop to the floor. His hands are shaking. And then he whoops loudly, gets up off his chair, and reaches out to hug Jeff tight. 

From then on, Jeff smiles every once in a while. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 1997)

Greg is speaking to a bearded man in traditional garb, one of their local contacts. They are using the guttural sounds that are more common in this general region than they are in the rest of Iraq, and Ryan sort of hates that he even can tell. He is hanging back, but watching the proceedings attentively anyway, one hand casually placed on his gun. Greg is armed as well, but not even remotely paying attention to that fact. He seems to be enjoying himself, words rapidly firing between the both of them; but this wouldn’t be the first time something goes wrong, so Ryan is there, standing guard. Greg got abducted straight from a meeting just like this last time they were in Iraq. Ryan went a little crazy in the four hours it took to track him down again. They found him alive, but beat up. It kind of broke his heart to see Greg lie there, bleeding, and not be able to kill the bastard who did it twice over. 

Suddenly Greg laughs out loud, and looks back at Ryan before nodding. Ryan looks up, but he can’t tell what must have been funny. A couple minutes later they are saying goodbye, a lot of shoulder-clapping and smiling and nods, and Greg comes back. He is still grinning, and shakes his head a little. 

“Good info?” Ryan asks. 

Greg snorts, “Oh no, he doesn’t know a thing.” And then goes back to looking delighted, “but he invited both of us to his brother’s hammam tomorrow.” 

“Hammam.” Ryan lets the letters roll over his lips but it still doesn’t sound remotely like it does when Greg says it. “Steam bath, right?”

“Yeah.” Greg seems genuinely pleased with himself. “Do you want to go with me?”

Ryan shrugs. “I suppose…” 

And that’s how the next day he ends up undressing in some small Arabian equivalent of a locker room, Greg at his side. Ryan follows Greg’s example and walks completely naked through a long hallway, to an open row of showers. It’s relatively busy and several men pass them by, everything from young boys barely in their teens to old, flabby men with missing teeth. Ryan is used to communal showers, and even though the ones at home now include bacteria-killing soaps and air-dryers instead of towels to combat the still-spreading virus, he doesn’t feel too much out of place in this rather old-fashioned place. But other than in the US where it would be considered polite to look away, here everyone unabashedly stares at them. Ryan is suddenly aware that he’s a lot taller, skinnier and decidedly less hairy than most of these men. Even Greg, while saying hi to everyone seems eager to get on to the hammam itself and Ryan gives him no argument. 

They step through a heavy door, into a small room that is already hot, damp and dark, and then through another door into the hammam itself. Ryan gets the impression of a large round room, even though the fog is dense enough that he isn’t able to see to the other side of it, filled with many people. He follows Greg closely and sits down next to him on a wet and warm marble bench. The air is hot and the entire room is incredibly damp, so much so that rivulets of burning hot water start running from his face to his back almost immediately. They sit for a couple minutes and then Greg gets invited to the middle of the room to lie on a marble altar of sorts. He accepts straight away and gets soaped in from top to bottom by a large, balding man. Ryan can see the man’s dick swing from side to side as he is washing Greg’s back. Greg seems to have no qualms about that and Ryan has to admit that he is faintly jealous. He has, as far as he can remember, never washed Greg’s back. 

After what looks like a serious scrubbing Greg is sent to the showers, and before he is back and therefore could translate that no, Ryan doesn’t feel like being washed _by a naked dude_ thank you very much in a polite way, Ryan gets urged onto the platform as well. Several men grin at him, their teeth reflecting white in the low light, clasp his hands and motion him up. Ryan reluctantly agrees and goes to lie down on the hot and watery marble plate. Just like Greg he gets coated in bubbles, clouds of them, and then (and he is glad that he can’t see the man’s dick from this angle) gets scrubbed down in the most violent manner he has ever experienced. The man is cleaning him as if he expects him to grow a second skin or something, but the amount of dirt that seems to peel off him is staggering, so Ryan suffers through it. It’s as if there is an entire desert stuck to his skin, and this man is determined to get it all. By the time he is deemed ready Greg is back, smiling at his sour expression. Ryan tries hard to only look him in the eye, nothing lower. He knows what Greg looks like, obviously, but he knows that in a place like this he can’t exactly look. He takes his obligatory shower trying hard not to feel out of place, which is difficult as there are two other men showering right next to him, chatting away while they’re scrubbing each other’s back. 

By the time Ryan returns Greg seems to be comfortably settled in, chatting with a group of four men now who all seem at ease, their body language lazy, arms spread out, legs open, so Ryan goes back to sit on his bench, and closes his eyes. It _is_ meanly relaxing, he has to hand that to them. The soft hiss of steam constantly being blown into the room. The drip drip drip of the water condensing on the walls and ceiling. The scrubbing and slapping sounds of bald wash-man, who has found himself another victim. All underscored with the soft rumble of many voices softly speaking in Arabic in the large, echoing room. The man currently on the altar now groans softly as he gets rubbed extra hard. Ryan winces in sympathy. His back still feels as if it got skinned but he also feels extremely clean, muscles long locked up tight now scrubbed into relaxation. 

After a while the steam seems to get even hotter, burning as he breathes it in through his nostrils. His vision goes spotty for a second, and he has to take a couple deep, controlled breaths. A young boy, maybe ten or so, comes round with little cups of cold water, and Ryan gratefully accepts one. His skin is starting to prune and he’s debating with himself on whether to ask Greg to go, when suddenly a little clear bell goes off, and everybody stands up. Greg comes over, walking carefully because of the wet floor. “Jumu’ah, Friday prayer, they’re all going.” 

“Oh,” Ryan says. He knows little about Muslim religion and he isn’t very interested, but he is still often impressed by the sheer power it has to stop any activity. Praying is not all that optional when you live in a world that regulates itself around it. “Should we go?” 

“No, I’ve arranged that we can stay a little longer.” Greg seems cheerful, and most certainly up to something. Ryan raises an eyebrow. Greg without glasses always seems a lot more approachable somehow. Younger. Greg leans in close, and Ryan still has to strain his ears to hear when he whispers “I’ve never had sex in a hammam.” 

Ryan feels his whole body awaken. God, that would be good. But they just can’t, not here, no. “You’re insane,” he says, not caring who hears. 

“They’re all going to be praying for an hour or so. We’ll block the door.” Greg looks at him with glittering eyes, still too close, naked, his skin completely healed now from the long-ago beating, so beautiful. There’s steam all around them, hiding them from view, it seems intimate. And at that point, Ryan already knows that he is not going to say no. He is never going to say no. Not at home. Not when they are on a mission. Not when they are in an Islamite country where what they are doing is illegal, and punishable by a whole host of things he is not even going to imagine. “This is fucking crazy,” he says, and he is not just talking about the moment. 

Greg looks alive. “Of course it is. But we’re going to do it anyway.” And Ryan feels the corners of his mouth pull into a grin. God. 

Greg moves towards the door with the last of the men, thanks them multiple times and then closes the door behind them and slides a solid block of marble, used as a seat, against it. By the time he is walking back his dick looks fuller already and now Ryan _is_ looking. 

Ryan says, “I’m not even sure I can get it up. It’s insanely hot in here.” He isn’t kidding. His dick is already giving a weak, interested twitch, but he can barely breathe in this steamy, burning air. He is sweating profusely simply from sitting still, and his whole body feels warm and sated. 

“Can’t hurt to try,” Greg mumbles, and he nudges Ryan’s knees apart and kneels on the wet floor between them. Ryan groans from the sight alone. Greg on his knees before him will never not do something for him. Greg takes his soft dick in his mouth and gets his hand under Ryan’s balls, plays with them gently. Ryan sighs and leans back. As the other people have left and the door has closed the steam is getting thicker and thicker, so much so that after a couple minutes he can barely make out the shape of Greg between his legs. Greg’s mouth is hot and slick, just as everything around them and he feels as if the sensation of Greg’s sucking, licking, isn’t just centered on his dick but runs across his entire body, dizzying wave after wave. Sweat and condense are mingling even harder and he actually feels as if he is standing under a light shower now, so many drops of hot liquid running over his back and belly. 

Wanting to feel more, he pushes his hands into Greg’s short, wet hair, and he can feel the rumble of Greg’s responding laugh against his pubic hair. He is getting hard he knows, he can feel it in the shift of angle, Greg has to crane his neck to suck the tip of his erection into his mouth now, and in the increased heat, heaviness, he feels as if all of him is simply melting into Greg’s mouth. 

Ryan would have been content to drift on that feeling forever, but too soon, Greg lets go of his dick with an obscene pop. “You ready now?” He sounds somewhat hoarse, and Ryan can’t tell if it’s from the air quality or sucking dick. Greg coughs, and gets up. Ryan still feels so very sated, aroused but in a general way. So he says, “Why don’t you fuck me?” 

“Really?” Greg asks. He sounds incredulous. Ryan got to liking it eventually, but they don’t do it very often. 

“I feel lazy, what do you think?” He grins at the general shape of Greg. Greg takes his hand, and pulls him to his feet. “Yeah, of course!” He sounds eager. Ryan wraps his arms around him and kisses him, just for that, open-mouthed and wet, unhurriedly chases his tongue. He can feel Greg’s dick rise against his hip. They lazily dance around each other, chests and arms and legs slicking together. Ryan hits the altar with the back of his legs and scoots onto it, lets himself fall open spread-eagle style, arms and legs so heavy, his dick fully hard now, rising up between his legs. 

Greg climbs up as well and brings a little terracotta can of liquid. Ryan feels slow, unthinking, and says heavily, “Did you bring that?” He can feel the little puff of an exhale as Greg places the can near Ryan’s hip. “No, it’s just oil, I saw it in the shower earlier.” 

Ryan lies back and lets Greg pour the warm oil on him, thread a finger through it and push it inside. Ryan is so relaxed it works a lot better than it usually does, and on the second try Greg angels his finger and hits Ryan’s prostate. Ryan sighs. One finger becomes two and Ryan feels his face start to burn with heat, a little thread of need making its way up his spine, multiplying, and he moves back needily onto Greg’s fingers. “Hmm,” is all he says but Greg knows him well enough to know what he means. Greg changes two fingers for three and yes, that stretches, burns, Ryan is conscious of how much he is tensing the muscles in his legs, trying to control, trying to feel… He takes a deep breath, and lets go, allows his whole body to join in Greg’s movement, in and out a brief brush of his prostate at every go, delicious. 

His eyes are closed when Greg’s fingers disappear and he opens them just in time to see Greg’s hands tremble as he pours some of the oil over his dick, uses both hands to spread it and looks up. In the low light it’s hard to tell but Greg seems to be blushing fiercely, they’re both still partially hidden in swirls of smoke, and Ryan reaches out and pulls Greg over him. Greg comes willingly, the surface so slippery he would have had little purchase to fight. Ryan opens his legs, and guides Greg between them. It doesn’t go easy, the head of Greg’s dick presses against him but doesn’t go in until Greg puts his hand between them and makes it so. He groans, or Ryan does, or maybe they both do, because suddenly Greg is inside of him and they are both lying very still, breathing hot breaths onto each other’s faces. 

Greg’s hands come up to cup the sides of Ryan’s cheeks and Ryan feels overwhelmed, under and in and wrapped within Greg, in this cocoon of heat and water and dark. Greg moves first, incrementally, and Ryan suddenly gets a chill, his arms breaking out in goose bumps as Greg hits his prostate. 

Ryan can hear his own voice, he sounds as if he is whining almost, just wanting. Greg looks at him with wide eyes, he’s not used to him letting go like that, and then moves faster, in and out with certain, long strokes, his eyes locked on Ryan’s and then lips moving over each other, searching a kiss. Their cheeks rub together, wet stubble scratching, and Greg’s body glides over Ryan’s at every thrust, his dick trapped between them being rubbed with him. Ryan leans his head back and Greg licks the trail of his neck, from his clavicle all the way to the point of his chin in one long wet stroke of tongue. 

Ryan moans, and puts his hands on Greg’s buttocks, squeezes them, pushes him away and then pulls him in close, forces him to give pleasure, to open him up over and over again, and now Greg is saying “Ryan,” breathily at every thrust, like a prayer or a demand or a warning, Ryan doesn’t know, but he knows Greg is amazing, it feels so good so he pulls him in harder. Greg looks at him the whole time, catalogues his face, puts his hand between them to wrap around Ryan’s dick, puts his mouth on Ryan’s again, not so much kissing as breathing and leaning, and takes another series of small thrusts, working Ryan’s dick at the same time. Ryan can feel him tense, hears him groan, knows that he is coming and lets himself fall over the edge as well, puts his legs around Greg, pulls him in as much as possible and holds him there, still moving, shaking, while his dick spurts warm between them. 

The moment fades and Greg rolls off, completely out of breath, Ryan feels dizzy and he is sure he greys out for a moment because the next thing he knows Greg is standing up next to him, and pressing a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth. Ryan lets his mouth open, his lips go slack in invitation but Greg is already moving away, unblocking the door. Ryan feels lightheaded, barely connected to his body at all, and follows Greg out only slowly. 

Once outside the fresher air helps immediately. Greg looks wrecked in the light. Lips bright red, face red with spots of beard burn, his entire body pink and raw. Ryan steps under the shower next to him, gasps at the ice cold water and the way it suddenly energizes his entire body. He takes a bar of soap and touches Greg’s side. Greg looks at him in surprise but then turns around easily so Ryan can wash his back. No question. Ryan touches him carefully. Eventually he mumbles quickly, knowing Greg can’t hear him over the rush of water, “Love you.”

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1997)

Greg is completely relaxed when they step back out onto the street, and he knows Ryan is as well. They are walking close together, the light is bright, the midday sun high. It’s a wonderful day. 

And then Greg notices a sharp, wheezing sound, a thwack, hears Ryan’s surprised inhale. He doesn’t realize anything is wrong until he sees Ryan lying sprawled on the ground. 

He didn’t even see him fall. Didn’t expect this to happen. Not now, not ever. 

Greg, every movement clumsy, too slow, as if time itself is coated in glue, ducks while a bullet flies past him, lands into the wall behind him and sprays them both with paint chips. 

There are shots being fired, Greg knows. His training tells him to take cover. To figure out whether it’s one shooter or more, and the direction. But there are people shouting, running in the street, cries. There’s Ryan’s blood pooling black onto the dusty street. Greg crouches over Ryan, and covers him. He presses his hand into Ryan’s side, finds blood, to his neck, and struggles to find a heartbeat. 

Greg killed the shooter, he finds out later. Perfect shot, straight through the chest. He has no recollection of that fact. 

The only thing he remembers is feeling Ryan’s blood spurt in warm gushes through his fingers, thinking ‘pressure’ and ‘medic’ and shouting, so much shouting. He radios out at one point, begs for help. He watches Ryan lose consciousness in excruciating detail, his eyes open wide, fingers search for his gun, and then his eyes roll back as he sags into the ground. Greg is terrified that it’s his own heartbeat he is feeling thrum his fingers, not Ryan’s. He leans over Ryan’s face to feel his breath whisper on his cheek. 

It takes a long, long time for reinforcements to arrive. An old woman in a black hijab brings him towels to press to Ryan’s wound. They turn bright red immediately. 

Greg holds on to Ryan, pushes on his wound, and prays. There’s not a single deity he believes in and deep down he knows it’s useless, but he, grasping at straws, recites all the prayers he knows. And then every line from the Koran he can think of. A couple men from the Hammam join him. A little further down the street, some others are crowding around the body of the shooter. Greg doesn’t notice. 

When the medics do finally arrive it’s loud, chaotic and ominous, a whole dozen or so men by jeep, and a couple minutes later, a helicopter. They chopper Ryan out of there to a field hospital, and Greg clings to his body beyond reason. He isn’t even aware when people shout at him to let go. In the field hospital they manage to stabilize Ryan but not operate, and they rush him into a plane to fly him out to Germany. Greg is left standing on an air strip, hands and face and uniform still marred with blood, gasping for air.

 

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

 

 

(Ryan, 2011)

Ryan starts performing when it’s just Colin left. There’s nothing sadder than having something beautiful and then watch it crumble away. There are less and less soldiers in the mess every day. There’s a new person on the other end of the line nearly every time he has radio contact with the base back home. The voices always sound younger and younger, more and more scared. The horrible thing is that he enjoys himself. For half an hour every day, he has fun. The other twenty-three-and-a-half are spent in worry and routine and senseless nothingness. Everybody has been exposed. They’re giving their lives for the guarding of… what? It’s only a matter of time, they all know it, and it seems so worthless. To quietly die between friends, fellow soldiers, in a bunker three hundred feet under the ground. It isn’t for the good of their country. It isn’t in defense of anything. 

Ryan visits the infirmary daily. It’s his first command and all he knows is how to make his men feel less scared about dying. He often stands watch and eyes the giant missile and the red, blinking button. He gets tempted sometimes. To press it, and to forget the one that opens the missile silo doors. He could blow them all to hell in a short and peaceful ten-second count-down. 

He feels incredibly guilty for being a man with immunity in between two dozen dying. And then it’s just a dozen. Ten. Eight. 

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1997)

The ride back to camp passes in a blur. 

Greg refuses to be the one to call Pat, refuses to talk to her even when she is hysterically sobbing on the other side of the line. He, for the first time ever, truly hates her. Clive at one point appears next to his side and doesn’t leave him for, as far as he can tell, days. Ryan is still alive and on route to Germany, that’s all they know. Greg repeats it in his head, over and over again. It’s seductive, to think about what he will do if Ryan dies. He stops the thought before it fully forms many times. Instead he just sits down on a cafeteria chair and stays there for a long time. Clive puts a blanket over his shoulders and holds him, but he has to try hard to feel any of it. 

Eventually, when dawn breaks, Greg gets up and showers. Eats. Does all the things he knows he has to do. He even signs up to go train with the other men, but Clive stops him. His aim would still be perfect, Greg knows. He hasn’t slept a minute. His hands are steadier than they have ever been. And that should frighten him but it doesn’t. He could kill again right now. Kill better. 

It’s a full twenty-four hours later when finally the call comes that Ryan is out of surgery and awake. The whole unit goes wild, and Greg forgets that he is standing up. His legs buckle under him and he sways, a wild rushing in his ears. He doesn’t quite go down because Clive is there to steady him. It’s only later that Greg realizes that if Ryan would have died that day, Clive would have been the one to catch him, too. 

When Ryan said that he didn’t remember the weeks following Drew’s death Greg had always thought he was exaggerating. Figure of speech. Turns out he wasn’t, because Greg himself lives through the next two months of deployment without having as much as a thought he remembers later. 

Ryan, who after a week or so in Germany gets shipped back to the US, calls every week. They probably even joke around a bit. But Greg’s still in some outer-body state; as if he is a robot that breathes and lives and follows orders but doesn’t quite do anything more, ever. 

When after two months his plane touches down on US soil Greg drives straight to Ryan’s house. Ryan has been in his house plenty of times but he has never been there, in what Greg thinks of as Pat’s territory, but he doesn’t care, he just needs to see him, to make sure. The drive takes four hours and he doesn’t stop once. Pat answers the door and Greg barges right past her, into the living room, where an even skinnier than usual Ryan is lying spread out on a hospital bed, watching TV. He looks up when Greg enters, eyes comically wide in surprise, and Greg walks over and just grabs him. And he hasn’t even changed his clothes. He probably stinks like Iraqi desert. He’s most certainly holding Ryan too tight. But Ryan is holding him right back, holds him for all he’s worth. They sit like that for what he knows is an embarrassingly long time. He can hear the TV, behind him. It’s football. He can feel Ryan’s warmth, he’s wearing a thin, ratty t-shirt that slips down near one shoulder. Greg’s cheek is resting on the warm, naked skin of Ryan’s neck. He can feel Ryan’s heartbeat, his strength. He’s alive. Alive, alive, it’s like the sweetest song, the best feeling, everything at once rushing and settling within him, and he lets out a breath that he didn’t know he had been holding for the last two months. 

When he lets go, Ryan’s large, warm hand stays on his back, rubbing circles. Pat is still in the doorway, watching them with a stunned look in her eyes. She barely knows him, Greg suddenly realizes. They’ve hardly ever talked, because even though there are plenty of BBQ’s and parties and get togethers, he tends to avoid her. She barely knows who he is and he just rushed in here to hug her husband.

Greg looks back at Ryan. Ryan is smiling, that soft, pleased smile he has when he feels surprised by something sweet. Greg knows it from ambushing him in the shower. From those rare closed-mouthed morning kisses when they get to wake up together. From just a cuddle, instead of sex. 

Pat coughs, and Greg reluctantly looks up at her. “You wanted to make sure he was ok?” She sounds a little confused, but also sort of distant. Greg wonders whether she’s finally understood that she shouldn’t like him, too. 

“Yeah,” he says, and looks back at Ryan. Ryan does look okay, mostly. He has some shadows under his eyes, but there’s color on his cheeks, now. His hair is longer than it usually is. It’s dark blonde, and has a bit of a curl to it. Greg immediately wants to play with it. Ryan’s eyes are sparkling, as if he can read his thoughts. And maybe he can, Greg thinks, and tries to look away to suppress what he knows is showing from every inch of him. The wall besides Ryan’s bed is filled with children’s drawings. There’s a pile of brightly-colored toys in the corner. 

Greg looks back at Pat. She hasn’t moved an inch. “I flew in this morning.” She nods, but doesn’t offer him a drink, or to sit down. Although that would be kind of a moot point, since he is already sitting on Ryan’s bed, his leg pressed tightly to Ryan’s thigh, their bodies angled towards each other. 

“I was just about to pick up the kids from daycare,” Pat says awkwardly. Greg sees that she does have a set of keys in her hand, and a purse slung over one shoulder. 

“We’ll be fine,” Ryan says genuinely, smile unassuming. 

She swallows. “All right.” She eyes Greg. “Nice to see you again, Greg.” 

Greg smiles. “You too, Pat.” He doesn’t think that he has ever called her by name before. She turns around and leaves, pulls the door shut behind her. They sit in silence; both listen to the sound of her car pulling out of the driveway, then look at each other and grin foolishly. 

Ryan scoots over on the bed, and Greg settles in next to him, his dirty boots over the white sheet, turns on his side, and holds Ryan again. Ryan laughs and then they’re kind of giggling, relief and happiness all tangled together. Greg can feel Ryan’s form next to him all the way down to his feet. Ryan pulls his head closer, and Greg, mindful not to hurt him, lets it lean on Ryan’s chest. He can hear Ryan’s heartbeat up close, sure and strong thuds under his ear. He can smell him. Feel him. Ryan’s hand settles on his neck. They don’t say anything for a long moment. 

“You drove up here straight from the airport?” Ryan asks, and Greg can hear the rumble of his voice perfectly up close, also the amazement in it. 

“Yeah. I had to…” He lets his hand swoop over Ryan’s body. “Know. That you’re fine.” He lifts his head, and looks Ryan in the eye. “Last time I held you, you were dying...” His voice breaks. Ryan blinks. “Can’t blame me for wanting to make sure.” 

Ryan reaches his hand to lie on Greg’s cheek, and pulls him closer. Their lips meet hard, a quick swipe of tongue, and Greg pulls back. Ryan’s hand stays on his cheek. “I’m fine.” 

Then he laughs, “But you, you smell absolutely awful.” Greg is about to protest, but Ryan tightens his grip and kisses him again, tongue more sure, searching this time, and Greg thinks that he’s probably right anyway. They cuddle for a couple minutes more, and then when Pat’s car turns back onto the driveway Greg gets up and presses a quick kiss to Ryan’s cheek (and he can’t help it, he loves the way Ryan looks at that, equal parts amused and turned on). He promises to come back soon and watch some senseless TV-show, and makes it to the door right as Pat is opening it. She’s holding one kid and wrangling another, so Greg jauntily waves at all of them and makes it out of the house unscathed. 

He feels absolutely high driving back to his place, buzzing with energy. Ryan is alive. Ryan is fine. Ryan is _really fucking hot_. They’re fine. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 1997)

Ryan feels strange, lying in the bed where only just a moment ago Greg was lying next to him (a smear of dirt from Greg’s shoes on the lower part of his sheets, he hopes Pat doesn’t notice), but he mainly feels whole again. It’s been years since they’ve been apart for this long, and it felt like hell. To wake up from a twisting, pain-filled drug haze, and not see Greg next to him. To be reassured by a German soldier in flawless English that no one else got hurt. To fade in and out of consciousness for days, no one there to tell him much of anything. He later heard that Greg’s actions, his hand pressed on his wound, had saved his life. That Greg killed the bastard who did it. In his eyes, Greg probably deserves a medal for that. 

Recovery is annoyingly slow. The first time he tries to get up to go to the damn bathroom by himself he tears three stitches. It’s even worse once he’s out of the hospital and gets reacquainted with exactly how much noise an excited two year old and a five year old make together. It’s hard on Pat as well. He’s settled into a pattern for being home over the years: he’ll go over a long list of chores that have to be done around the house, he’ll play with the kids, sleep with Pat, repeat until he gets deployed again. But now he’s really home. And he finds that he doesn’t know who Pat is anymore. He doesn’t recognize any of her friends. He doesn’t know any of the shows she watches on TV, finds her choice of food boring (at first, she would just make his favorites, but after a week or so they ran out on things to agree on). He doesn’t understand her day to day life, and gets tired of having to reassure her constantly. 

The newspapers are still blaring about the infection of the new century, about to change the world. Ryan sees it mostly as a media-induced frenzy, but Pat is genuinely terrified. She worries when the kids don’t brush their teeth, or wash their hands often enough. She reads up on vaccinations, and takes them to the doctor over sniffles. When a kid in their playgroup is sick, she keeps them home as well. 

Pat spends a lot of time shopping, cleaning, in her own words ‘giving the kids the best life she can’ and Ryan finds he can’t tell the difference between a clean floor and a dirty one. A new dress and an old one. He thinks kids should be allowed to get dirty and play. Pat prefers to have them in front of the TV where she can keep an eye on them. They have never argued about the kids before, but now Ryan is right in the middle of it all he finds he doesn’t agree with almost anything she does. 

He knows that there are much worse things in the world that banged-up knees, and petty fights about who gets to hold the red crayon. He struggles to find the Pat that once knew those things, too. And he knows that she’s just scared, that he’s gone all the time and that he’s left all of this to her, that it’s only normal that she has her doubts and insecurities and that she should be allowed to unload them on him when he’s home. That he just got shot and nearly died. That her fear is founded in reality, because there have been some children victims of the oddly persistent flu. But compared to what is out there… He has seen children die of hunger. Whether Sam, who is perfectly healthy and happy, eats his potatoes or not seems so silly in comparison Ryan can’t get himself worked up over it, no matter how much she seems to want him to. 

He gets to go to physical therapy a couple times a week, and once he can walk well enough, goes over to Greg’s often, but still the months drag on slowly. 

The first day he is back on light duty they throw him a party, and Ryan is so grateful to be back he nearly tears up.

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1997-1998)

Once he knows Ryan is recovering, believes it, Greg relaxes. He gets to see him often, they start having (careful) sex again, and he can’t help but feel grateful for it. 

In the next year, Ryan grows truly unhappy with Pat, even depressed at times, but it’s never about him, so Greg tries to stay out of it. 

Greg himself feels quite good about his life. He never wanted to marry or have kids anyway. He could have left the army a while ago, but he sees no reason to. He went back to San Francisco once, hung around the Castro. Tried to imagine his life like that, picking up a different guy every night, fucking them and forgetting their names only to fuck them all over again. It felt a little senseless. 

The only thing he could be tempted by is London, still, but by sticking with the army he now has enough combat pay to fly over there at least a couple times a year and perform with Josie and her friends. They’ve called themselves the Comedy Store Players. They play in an actual comedy club, too. Within the span of two years Caroline married Steve and then divorced him again. They are still sleeping together though, Josie tells him with an eye roll. Jim still doesn’t have a girlfriend or boyfriend. They get joined by a rather slick guy named Paul who Greg has to admit is great on stage, but after Josie briefly dates him and then calls him a bastard he can never quite bring himself to like the man. There is such a thing as loyalty, after all. 

Greg spends the next Christmas with Clive and his family, and in time becomes a bit of an honorary uncle to the kids, and good friends with Stephen. 

When a new soldier, Jen, joins their unit that summer, Greg immediately likes her. She’s not the first woman he’s served with, far from it, but there still aren’t many, and mostly they tend to stick together a bit, form friendships among themselves. He’s still working on getting Josie over to the US some time because it would be awesome to actually perform with a woman on stage who isn’t afraid to get vulgar in front of a room of rowdy men. Now Richard gets stuck playing the woman more often than not (and claims to hate it, but Greg has seen him in drag a couple of times and surprisingly, he can pull it off).

Jen sucks at improv (Greg only held out hope for her briefly) but she’s that frank, very intelligent, never think twice type of woman he is so very attracted to. She is also a lesbian. Greg figures it out within minutes of meeting her, but Ryan doesn’t, and after Greg tells him excitedly about her Ryan gives him the cold shoulder for about a day before Greg takes pity on him and tells him that no, he isn’t going to fuck the new girl. Promise. Because of that little charade Jen also figures out both Greg and Ryan damn quick, and Greg has to do a bit of damage control in asking her to please, please keep whatever she is thinking quiet. There are more within the unit who know, he is sure, more who are prone to occasional gay sex even (if those sounds he hears coming from the tents at night are any indication), but this isn’t something anyone ever talks about. No one acknowledges it. It just is. 

But Jen, with her buzz cut, tattoo of barbed wire around her muscular upper arm and love for Harley Davidsons isn’t all that subtle. She even has a picture of a blonde-haired woman hanging above her bed, beautiful girl, smiling sweetly at the camera. When Greg asks she says, “Heather,” and for a second manages to look a little dopey. Heather is a nurse in the local hospital (and ironically works with Jane, Clive’s wife) and lives right off base with their two cats (whom Jen also has pictures of). They’ve been dating for a year and Jen is crazy about her. Greg wishes them all the luck in the world and easily falls into a close friendship with her, which over the following months Ryan only slowly learns not to be paranoid of.

 

 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

 

 

(Ryan, 2011)

The months pass by slowly. Ryan only finds out much later about the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’. When he does, though, he imagines Greg on the other side of the world somewhere, celebrating. 

And he hates that it gets harder to remember now. Greg’s hands, Greg’s face, his words. He knows them all by heart, but they’re memories. Memories fade. It gets harder to recall the cadence of his speech. The tickle of his breath on his naked chest. The touch of his fingers, his lips, his hips. 

Ryan spends a lot of time alone. They should have gotten reinforcements a couple weeks ago. They didn’t. He dreams about the past and wakes up happy. The small army bed is utterly familiar, the olive green walls, the cement and concrete, it’s what he has spent his life around these past twenty years. And then he looks around and realizes he’s the only one left in his room. Gone are the faces of the dead. 

He focuses on Colin, and they invent a lot of games that only take two to play. Their audience is loyal. Until there is no audience anymore. 

 

\---

 

(Greg, 1999)

In a twist of fate, Greg gets to celebrate his 30th birthday on the same base in Afghanistan they were five-and-a-half years earlier. The country has gone to hell in the mean time. The Taliban regime that back then was just an overly zealous splinter organization is now running the entire country, and the difference is palpable. They no longer get greeted on the street. It’s not safe enough to go to the local market, let alone wander in the desert. There are guns, and people ready to use them, everywhere. 

The then rather small tent-camp is now modernized enough to have actual buildings, and they sleep in barracks. Greg, although he is somewhat sad the tents are gone, feels unexpectedly nostalgic when they drive up to that spot again. It is now hidden behind a fence of barbed wire, but the desert still looks identical. The weather’s not nearly as humid as it was back then, now simply bright, dusty and simmeringly hot. There are still birds hunting the sky and crickets at sunset. 

Greg and Ryan celebrate their first night there by leaning against a sun-warmed stone wall, now, having a smoke and a stolen kiss. It’s good. 

Greg doesn’t expect much for his birthday, mainly the same as usual, a couple of beers, an improvised song from Richard, phone calls from Mike and Josie, some hugs, shoulder claps, jokes. On Ryan’s 30th they were back on base, and Ryan spent it at home, only ringing Greg’s door well after the kids were in bed. Greg had prepared some cake (Edmund, Clive’s oldest, thirteen by now and a baking fanatic, taught him how), but Ryan, laughing, tackled him to the floor as soon as he arrived and fucked him right there in the hallway. They ate the cake off each other’s stomachs later. It’s one of Greg’s favorite memories, but not something they can recreate here exactly. 

He suspects something is up when nothing happens all day, and is proven right when after his shift Jen suspiciously hugs him and holds him down while Richard blindfolds him and together they push him into a car. Greg’s immediately reminded of boot camp, and all the crazy humiliating stuff some soldiers, especially the young ones, still think is funny and bitches as loud as he can in the hope that someone will overhear and stop them. But then Clive yells at him from the driver’s seat to please be quiet, so Greg relaxes immediately. Clive would never do anything to physically hurt him, Greg knows, and the fact that they got him to agree to this means that it’s going to be fine. He might even like it. They drive for a good long while, Greg’s sense of time is altered by the blindfold, but he thinks it must be at least twenty minutes. When Clive finally stops and helps him out, Greg tentatively walks though what sounds like a gate, hardened soil beneath his feet, and then though a door. When Clive tells him he can look, he is surprised to see that it is almost dark. They are in a walled garden of some sort, a palm-tree plantation, he thinks. Clive hugs him, tells him to enjoy it and leaves. 

Greg had expected Ryan, of course. Maybe even some suggestively placed mattress (and he would have totally been into that). But instead, as he walks to the middle of the rows and rows of palm trees, there is a children’s swimming pool, cartoon characters lining the inflatable sides, filled with water. There are a couple tea lights floating on the water, throwing their shadows, reflecting, and a nervous-looking Ryan standing next to it. Greg smiles, and, when Ryan starts seductively stripping off his uniform to reveal a red Speedo underneath, laughs and laughs. 

Ryan walks up, almost naked in the hot desert air, and whispers, “So, Happy Birthday,” before kissing him. Greg easily loses himself in the smooth heat of Ryan’s kiss, for once not worried about being seen. This is without question the most romantic thing Ryan (or anyone, for that matter) has ever done for him, and it’s a kiddy pool. In Afghanistan. He looks around. There’s no one in sight, high walls on every side. He knows that Ryan must have paid off the owner of whatever this place is. They are as private as they are going to get. It’s perfect. 

Ryan grins at his expression. “You like it?” 

“Well I did say I wanted a pool party this year,” Greg says, and starts unbuttoning his shirt.

“You did at that,” Ryan says easily, and puts a foot into the pool, careful not to disturb the candles. 

“Where did you find this thing anyway?” Greg asks while taking off his pants. He can’t remember ever seeing this at the local market. Or any store that would carry it. 

“It was in one of the storage closets on base,” Ryan says while lowering himself completely into the water, sighing contentedly. 

Greg doesn’t bother with keeping his underpants on, goes completely naked, breeze teasing on his skin, dirt crunching under his toes. He dusts his feet off with his hand before stepping in, has to maneuver around Ryan’s limbs and the floating candles, and is surprised at the temperature of the water. It’s warm. Warmer than the outside air. It must have been standing in the sun for part of the day, Greg thinks, and then gets distracted by the way Ryan’s eyes are traveling over his body. He settles in carefully, the water level going up to nearly overflowing once his whole body is submerged, and leans on Ryan’s chest. He can’t help but sigh too. This is great. 

From where they’re sitting he can see palm tree leaves fluttering with the passing of a mild breeze. See a giant, impressive night sky of beginning stars without any light interference. It’s magic. 

Ryan speaks into his ear, “Happy?” 

And Greg can’t help but say, “God, yeah.” If he was a woman, he would be expecting a ring to pop up around now. Instead he can feel the beginning of Ryan’s erection against his lower back, and leans into it gratefully. The candles drift back and forth over the water. One of them sputters out with a soft sizzle. 

Ryan’s warm hand reaches up, and slowly pinches one of Greg’s nipples. Greg settles into Ryan’s arms more comfortably, lets his head lean on Ryan’s shoulder. Ryan can look over him now, see what he’s doing. Ryan’s hand stays around, splayed warm on his chest, and reaches out to lazily rub and pinch the other nipple into hardness. Greg shifts a little, until his left buttock is touching Ryan’s hard on again, the feeling brilliantly warm even under the water. Ryan laughs and then reaches under the water as well, to Greg’s not-really-hard-yet dick. He’s obviously teasing, tracing back up and down, scooping up handfuls of water and letting them run over Greg’s chest, but Greg doesn’t mind. It’s almost alien to have the time to do this. Part of him wants to turn around and capture Ryan’s mouth right this second, but the rest of him is content to wait it out. Ryan seems to be as well. He keeps his touches light, enough to arouse, but no more. 

Greg reaches behind him, and traces Ryan’s erection trough the fabric of his Speedos. He likes the contrast against his fingers. “I remembered you liked this pair,” Ryan says into his ear. “You used to come watch me swim.” And god, did he ever. He used to get up early on Saturdays to watch Ryan’s lean, muscled body slice through the water. Greg flushes when he remembers seeing him like that. Ryan kissed him once. Pushed himself up, right out of the water, and planted a kiss on him. Wet, cold lips, warm tongue. It’s been years, but Greg remembers just fine. Having to sneak out of the practice with a raging hard-on, take care of it and then return to watch Ryan again. Jerk himself raw the whole afternoon with the image burning fresh in his mind. 

“I could get off three times in an hour back then,” Greg says, tone playing at regret. He could, but that doesn’t mean it was any better. Desire would almost hurt back then. 

“Getting old now?” Ryan asks, voice heavy with innuendo. 

Greg doesn’t feel old yet. In fact, he feels about ten times better than he did at twenty-three. He grabs Ryan’s dick, fingers quick and wicked, before letting go just as fast. “What do you think, Stiles?” He tenses his stomach muscles, and makes his half-hard dick jump into Ryan’s hand. Ryan laughs, fingers circling him happily, and starts to jerk him slowly. Greg settles into the movement, allows himself to be teased into full hardness. 

Then he stops Ryan’s hand, squeezes it, and turns around, the wave his sudden movement causes drowning two more of the candles, and settles himself on Ryan’s lap. Ryan’s legs are under him, and he’s leaning on his knees, ass resting on Ryan’s upper legs. He takes his glasses off; they’re splattered with water drops anyway, and carefully puts them to the side. Then he takes Ryan’s head between his hands, and kisses him soundly. Ryan smiles, and lets him do it. 

Greg lowers himself into the water, looks behind him to make sure none of the candles, bopping up and down on the waves now, are going to set his ass on fire, and starts kissing Ryan’s chest. Softly bites the tense line of Ryan’s shoulder and neck. He is never allowed to leave bruises, too many public showers, too many physicals and people who could ask questions, but dammit, tonight he wants to. He keeps his bites soft on purpose, more the suggestion of teeth than anything that breaks the skin, soft sucking instead of the hard, damaging kind he would want to do. Ryan writhes beneath him anyway, makes soft, moaning noises, and then, when he seems to realize that no one can hear them, loud ones. 

Greg is really enjoying this birthday. Even more so when after a while Ryan gives him that look that means he is getting so turned on that he needs to move right this second, and reverses their positions by hooking a leg over Greg’s back, and twisting him over. The pool can barely take the strain, the inflated sides bouncing downwards and a great wave of water gulps over the side. The couple remaining candles in the water have clustered together on the other side of the pool, and seem to be hanging on for the ride. Ryan however, notices none of it and sets to biting, sucking, licking, tasting Greg himself. He takes off his Speedo, hooks his arms over Greg’s and they’re face-to-face, kissing, Ryan rubbing his dick against Greg’s stomach, and Greg feels elated. God, how he loves this man. 

They twist around each other, Ryan spreads out more, his feet making a splash and yes, there go the candles. Suddenly it’s very dark but Greg’s eyes adapt quickly, now there’s only stars and a wet Ryan above him, next to him, around him. Ryan pushes at his legs, prods his dick there, and Greg understands, they’ve done it this way often before when there’s no lube, no time to deal with any of the details, just desire. Ryan slides his dick between the opening of Greg’s upper legs pressed together, holds on to him, and pushes in and out, face close to Greg’s, Greg kissing him, hands traveling all over Ryan’s wet, slippery back and shoulders, the curve of his spine, the dip right before his ass… It’s fucking amazing. Greg leans even more on the side of the pool, takes most of Ryan’s weight.

Suddenly there’s an ominous tearing sound, and before either of them can respond the entire pool rips, and in a big torrent of water Greg falls through the side to land on his back in a puddle of water, Ryan on top of him. They both groan, and then Greg snorts, and Ryan’s whole body starts to shake before the laughter reaches his lips and he releases it. 

“Ow!” Greg says, tears of laughter in his eyes, hand trailing towards his back. He’s going to have one hell of a bruise. Also, Ryan is all bones and muscle and damned heavy to have landing on top of him like that. 

“We tore up a swimming pool!” Ryan says, as if he can’t quite believe it. He doesn’t move though. 

Greg pulls him closer. The ground is hard as fuck, and the air is kind of cold now, wet as they are. But they were busy. “I believe we were in the middle of something?” he asks, dick springing forward happily, reaching as if on its own account towards Ryan’s hand. 

Ryan grins. “Oh sure, what were we doing again?” And then he rolls off of Greg, splat in the puddle of water and mud as if he doesn’t care one bit, then sprawls there, hands tucked underneath his head, and looks up at the sky. “Nice stars tonight.” His still-hard dick betrays him, of course. 

Greg pretends he doesn’t care while his hands start digging up the soil. When he has two nice handfuls of mud, he sits up, leans over, and slowly, relishing every second, splats them on Ryan’s chest with two hard thumps. Ryan laughs, but he’s obviously none too surprised because he grabs Greg’s dirty hands, pulls him over (Greg goes willingly) and then kisses him on the mouth before wrestling him down and meshing their chests together. The mud is kind of cold and blubbery feeling between them. Greg can’t decide whether he finds it hot or just nasty, but then there is a splat of wet earth on his head, Ryan’s hand rubbing it in, and another kiss. The air smells strongly of dirt now, earthy, wet. Ryan’s mouth tastes warm and familiar. Ryan, obviously in a playful mood, doesn’t let it drag on too long, disconnects them, and attacks Greg again. Greg has no choice but to retaliate, and soon they’re in an actual mud fight, their yells echoing loudly of the walls. 

Greg isn’t sure whether he or Ryan won, because suddenly they’re in each other’s mouths again, hands on erections, and they jerk each other off, still breathless with laughter and warm with adrenaline. 

Once they come down from the high they crawl really close because it’s getting quite cold, and then (regretfully) go find the garden hose Ryan used to fill the pool earlier. The water feels like liquid ice, and it takes a whole lot of scrubbing to get the mud off. Greg is quite sure there is still some in his hair when he, shivering, goes in search of his clothes again and pulls them on. His glasses are alright (thank god, because it would be hell to try and find a Ray-Ban frame in the Middle East) but his clothes are soggy. He puts them on anyway, and carries the towel Ryan was smart enough to bring around his shoulders. They leave the mess of broken pool, scattered candles, mud and upturned soil for the owners. Ryan claims he paid them well enough anyway, and Greg knows he did. 

They drive through the stunning, cold desert night, the zooming of the jeep’s engine the only sound out for miles, and Greg puts his hand on Ryan’s knee. Ryan places his hand over Greg’s, and intertwines their fingers. It’s the only point of heat on their cold drive, the wind beating in their face making conversation difficult, and Greg catches himself wishing it would be over soon so that he can go warm up, and at the same time wishes they would never have to arrive anywhere, could drive through the night just like this. The two of them, the endless desert. 

Of course they do arrive on the well-lit base, pass through security, park the jeep, and after a short detour to grab a new set and clothes and soap, strip side by side in the dressing room and leave a trail of dirt going towards the showers. It’s nearing midnight, and although there is still some activity outside, the showers are dark and deserted. They get in, take the ones closest to each other and turn it on as hot as possible before stepping under the spray. Greg actually moans when the heat pounds down on his back, eases his pulled muscles and bruises, and turns his skin into a bright pink. Ryan, who even has mud on his pubes still, stands with his eyes closed, face lifted up towards the water and hums happily. Greg knows they can’t have sex again right there, but he still lets his eyes drink in the sight. He can never get enough of seeing Ryan both naked and happy. There are tendrils of steam curling around them now, and it reminds Greg of the Hammam, which makes him in turn feel so very grateful. Ryan’s scar is still impressive, but has healed into red, uneven lines, which eventually will even turn white, Greg knows. 

Ryan notices he’s being watched, and shakes his head, sending water everywhere, and grins at Greg. 

Greg soaps himself in, rinses and repeats at least three times to get completely clean, the residue of their fun running brown and gritty towards the drain. When he’s done with himself he goes to assist Ryan, who doesn’t quite need the help but accepts it smilingly anyway. His skin is smooth and pliable under Greg’s fingers. There are some lines on Ryan’s back which Greg knows must be from his nails. He doesn’t remember doing that, but can’t quite bring himself to regret it. He leans into Ryan and kisses him softly, the hot water breaking over their faces. He hates to break it off, but knows they have to. Ryan looks equally regretful, but they step apart to go dry off. 

It is none too soon, because a minute later they hear the door slam, and someone walks in. 

It is the last good part of Afghanistan, and they don’t realize how lucky they’ve been until some of the unit, Richard among them, get attacked on that same desert road a mere day later. The week after that it’s a car bomb. A couple days later fire from enemy rifles, high up in the mountains. They have to chopper out of that area within weeks because it gets overrun by a terrorist militia. On top of that, an officer of another unit propositions Jen. He calls her a dyke, tells her the cure would be his dick, the usual. She fights him off, of course, but she still spends the evening sandwiched between Richard and Clive, saying that it’s nothing new, that she can take care of herself. There’s a heavy bruise forming on her cheek, and around the third drink she breaks down and cries, the whole time still creatively cursing at the man. Greg holds her. 

They celebrate the new millennium at a base in the very north of Afghanistan, have a party at the local midnight and then watch a grainy feed of the millennium ball dropping on Times Square in New York at ten in the morning. Greg manages to sneak a kiss to Ryan at both of the New Years. Clive, Jen and Richard (leg wrapped up in gauze, crutches on the chair next to him) see, and smile.

 

 

 

 


	11. Chapter 11

 

 

(Greg, 2011)

Greg works well with Jeff, they even manage to broker some peace deals with the local terrorist groups. The Afghan people are dying just as fiercely as the US soldiers are, after all. It makes some men crazy, and others cautious. Some of their unit go trigger happy on the locals when more and more news from back home gets around. Some eat their own guns, get found with brains splattered all over the wall of a toilet stall. Greg stays in touch with Josie until communication gets harder. Too few people to maintain power lines. Through satellite he reaches her once more. He tells her to take care, and that he loves her. And then it’s over. 

Jeff tells him he doesn’t know of a single person any more that he once loved and is still alive, and Greg feels spoiled rotten. Jen, Clive and Stephen are still there, and when phones lines run dead, send him old-fashioned letters that planes, filled with new recruits, carry over. When Jeff one bright morning steps in front of a gun for him and dares the shooter to pull the trigger, Greg knows it wasn’t an accident. Or even a bad day. 

Jeff was done before he ever met him. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 2000)

Ryan is in his dress uniform, Mackenzie on one hand, Sam at the other, Pat walking three steps in front of them (they haven’t spoken in days). He is at Greg’s wedding. No, he did not see this one coming. 

It was the officer, the son of a bitch who tried to get into Jen’s pants back in Afghanistan, knowing full well that she would say no. He reported her. Jen only found out when she got a letter informing her she was no longer on active duty, on the grounds of suspicion of breaking DADT. And Ryan knows she is guilty of course, as do most of the unit. But it doesn’t make it any easier when they are all sitting in Clive’s new-and-even-smaller office. Mike, who has gained some weight since being off active duty, is sitting in the sofa, taking up most of the space but Richard, who is leaning into him, doesn’t seem to mind. Clive is behind his desk, eyes troubled with compassion. Greg is sitting on the desk, fingers tapping out a quick rhythm. Ryan is leaning against a low closet. Jen is sitting on the floor, letter crumpled in her hands. She has a bright flush on his cheeks, red-rimmed eyes, but she’s no longer crying. She looks ready to fight. 

“I’m not going,” she says. And then, “They can’t prove anything.” 

Ryan privately thinks that they probably can, but keeps it to himself. Greg gives him a look that he can’t read. 

It’s Mike who comes up with the idea. He says, voice slow and pensive, “They probably have enough circumstantial evidence, but nothing definite. The only way I can see this go away if is you claim to have been in a relationship with a man all along, and if possible get married.” 

“Get married?” she asks, dislike obvious on her face. Ryan has an idea of what she is thinking. 

“I would offer myself, but,” Mike darts a quick look in Richards direction, “I believe I don’t know you well enough. It would be too unlikely a match either way.” 

Somebody walks by the door. They all hold their breath.

“I can do it.” The words hang in the air. Greg looks as if he can’t quite believe what he has just said. Jen looks at him with obvious surprise.

Ryan closes his eyes. Fuck. 

They fight about it later, behind closed doors. “Well, you have a wife too!” Greg tells him. 

“Doesn’t mean you have to get a fake one,” Ryan grumbles, but he knows that he has already lost the argument. The rules are unfair, Jen is their friend. Of course Greg wants to help her. 

The next day, Greg proposes to Jen in the very public mess hall, and two weeks later on Valentine’s Day they are in a small church, all twenty or so guests, to see this sham of a marriage happen. Ryan’s kids and Clive’s are the bridesmaids and grooms. Heather is there and looks at Jen, who looks uncomfortable in a poufy white dress Ryan knows is from Goodwill, with badly disguised tears in her eyes. Clive is officiating; Pat sits herself by the kids and away from Ryan, so Ryan ends up sitting next to Heather. The irony isn’t lost on either of them. He reaches out and pats her knee, lightly, while Jen recites her vows. Endless love, devotion. The good thing is that Greg looks about as miserable as he feels. 

The after party is in a bar and they drink a lot of alcohol that night. Greg drinks shots as if they’re lemonade. Jen downs about a gallon of champagne while sneaking out to the bathrooms to make out with Heather about once an hour. Ryan sticks to whiskey. When Pat takes the kids and leaves he doesn’t even notice. 

He ends up out on the parking lot at about four am without a car or anyone to drive him, so he does the most natural thing and goes back home with Greg, Jen and Heather. He sleeps half-naked and curled up around Greg on Heather’s sofa bed, and barely avoids throwing up all over him when he wakes up and jostles the bed. Ryan just makes it to the bathroom where Heather is sitting, head leaning on the toilet, hair in greasy strings around her face, softly groaning, and has to push her out of the way to throw up, which makes her start gagging all over again. 

A couple minutes later they get joined by both Greg and Jen, Greg jokes about starting a religion to worship the porcelain god, and then they are all softly groaning and laughing at the fucking absurdness of their lives. 

The four of them are so hung-over it takes until noon for the medication to start working and they all go out to lunch together, eggs and sausage, something to take the damn nausea away. Despite all of that, the mood is good between them, and Ryan even sort of enjoys himself. Heather has a kind of humor that reminds him of Richard’s, completely unexpected but bright and hilarious. 

Ryan takes a cab back home from the restaurant, leaves Greg to whatever the honeymoon is going to mean for him (Ryan suspects bad TV while cuddled up on the sofa with Heather’s cats). When he opens the door the house is quiet, and then there is Pat, yelling, raging that he didn’t come home last night. And Ryan remembers that he’s had this coming for a very, very long time. 

He thinks this is it. She’s going to ask for a divorce. And the thing is, he’s instantly relieved. They haven’t slept together in forever. He has been spending nights with Greg for years and yet she’s always turned a blind eye. But now she slaps him in the face and he doesn’t try to defend himself. She yells about him cheating, and he nods. And then, god, she says Heather’s name where it should be Greg’s. She thinks he has been cheating with Heather last night. Ryan can barely believe it. 

He says, calmly, “Pat, no. Heather is Jen’s girlfriend.”

“And then who is Greg?” she says, and she seems so afraid of the answer that he, for the first time in a long time, feels so sorry for what he’s done to her. 

He says, quietly, “You know. I know you do.”

And she just sort of folds into herself and says, “You haven’t cheated on me with anyone else but him? I want to know.” 

Ryan says, “No!” Because he hasn’t, he wouldn’t, he never. 

And then she nods and says, a strange kind of light in her eyes that he remembers from such a long time ago, “I knew, you know. I knew when I married you.” 

Ryan boggles. “What? I wasn’t, I mean I didn’t…” He had never even kissed a guy before Greg. He wasn’t gay. He still isn’t, besides Greg. 

“I knew you’d cheat on me some day.” Pat says. “I knew I wasn’t going to be the one you’d love forever. And I married you anyway.” 

“Oh,” Ryan says, because that’s all he can think to say. 

Pat starts making dinner, face drawn. They eat it, then Pat goes to get the kids from a neighbor, and they put them to bed together. Ryan offers to sleep on the sofa, but Pat looks at him as if he is crazy. 

Then they do the craziest thing of all. They go on with their lives. 

 

\---

 

(Greg, 2000)

Greg finds himself not all that unhappy with his new bride, or, truthfully, brides. He keeps his house on base, Heather keeps her place off base, and Jen moves between the two of them, just like Ryan moves between Pat’s house and Greg’s. 

Clive shakes his head disbelievingly at Greg and teases, “When I introduced you to my family, I never expected you to follow into my footsteps!”

“Ah but, I don’t have sex with either of my wives.” Greg grins. “While you…”

“Yes, yes, point taken.” Clive laughs. 

It takes months for Jen’s case to appear in military court, and when Greg lies under oath and testifies about the reason why they’ve kept their relationship a secret for so long (fraternization rules, decorum, etc.) the case gets dismissed. Jen gets assigned to a different unit, but in all it’s a small price to pay. Just like the dog tags, wearing the wedding ring turns into a habit easily. 

 

Later in the year, Jane, Clive’s wife, gets sick. It’s the same flu-like infection, that one that has cyclically been returning for years, making a wave of victims and then disappearing again to come back stronger. She’s a doctor so it’s a miracle she hasn’t gotten it earlier, and no one, not even she herself, is all that worried at first. Clive even comes to work. But then, suddenly, she takes a turn for the worst. 

Clive, who caught it in ’96 and is theoretically immune now, sits by her bedside for weeks. And she doesn’t get better. It’s the kind of situation where everybody believes that yeah, it’s bad, but she’s a strong woman and modern medicine is good enough to pull her through. And then she doesn’t. She dies a month after exposure, and everybody is just stunned. Greg feels as if the floor has been pulled from under his feet. He got this flu. Ryan got it, badly even, and lived just fine. Clive got it, half of the people they know got it. And Jane, she dies. 

The church is filled to the brim at her funeral. Clive is devastated, the kids are crying their eyes out, and Stephen has to sit on the second row, behind “family.” Greg keeps him company, and stays at their house for a couple days. It’s insane. 

Later that month they fly out to Iraq without Clive, who will never take an out of the country mission again. Mike is on base. Jen is in a different unit. It’s just Greg, Ryan and Richard, and it feels fucking strange. Greg thinks of Drew, who has been dead for such a long time now. All the other men and women he has known to die. He can think of at least ten and thinks that’s probably too much, for someone his age. 

He doesn’t realize that it’s only the beginning. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 2001)

Ryan is at Greg’s when Mackenzie comes home from school sick. Pat calls him in a panic because she has a fever of 104, and they drive her to the base hospital wrapped in her bed sheets. She is moaning and screaming, caught in the fever, and she never comes out. She hangs on, is in a coma for another week or so before her little heart gives out. 

Pat howls, and cries, and kicks, and Ryan holds her and tells her it will be okay because he knows of nothing else to do. Clive, quieter, harder since Jane died, joins them and takes care of the funeral, everything. They never get to bury her on the day they planned because that night Sam gets chills, throws up, feels hot to touch, and Ryan puts him into an ice bath, calls the ambulance, then Heather, does everything she tells him to do, but it doesn’t matter. They get Sam into the hospital on time, but the antibiotics don’t work. They even put him on an experimental chemo treatment, throw everything they have at it. He dies ten days later. 

And it’s unimaginable. 

It’s such a huge, immensely wrong thing to happen that he can’t even believe it’s real, or true. Children shouldn’t die. Pat is in turns hysteric and catatonic. Clive practically lives with them, but Ryan hears none of what he says. Greg comes over and probably holds him, but he can’t remember. Every morning he wakes up and just for a second, believes everything is normal, and then it hits him all over again, like a giant roadblock, something to never get past. He tries not sleeping for a couple days. It helps, some. And of course the truth is that he was never all that good a father. He didn’t even want Sam. Which makes it all that much, much worse. 

When his compassionate leave runs out and they call him back in for duty, he doesn’t go.

 

 

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

 

 

(Ryan, 2011)

They continue to play improv in an empty mess hall. There’s no one watching anymore. Doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Ryan seriously thinks about deserting, now. He’s built up his career in the military all the way to this, and now he finds that he doesn’t care anymore. They could leave, Colin and him. Leave the goddamn bomb for what it is and go find the ones they do care about. 

Then Colin coughs. 

Ryan pretends not to notice for a day or two. He sends out an SOS over the radio. No one answers. When Colin isn’t strong enough to stand up any more, Ryan sits on the side of his bed and they play word games. Alphabet. Sound effects. Rhyme. 

When the time comes it’s the middle of night. Ryan hasn’t slept for forty hours. Colin is wheezing, eyes glossy with an unbeatable fever, face an unnatural shade of white. He is holding on. He hands Ryan a photograph, and an address in Canada. “Luke,” he says, “My son.” 

And Ryan says, “Yes,” and “I promise.” And then gets the morphine injection Colin had prepared days earlier. 

He holds Colin’s hand while he injects him. He talks to him while he kills him. He tries to make him smile, even then. And closes his eyes for him when he can’t any more. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 2001-2004)

On the 11th of September 2001, two planes fly into the twin towers. Ryan doesn’t notice, at first, wants to turn the TV off while Pat sits transfixed in front of it, terrified that it’s the end of the world. But once he realizes what is happening, and it only filters slowly through the fog of grief in his mind, he goes to find his uniform, kisses Pat goodbye and, for the first time in four months, drives to base. 

He volunteers for the first mission there is to find, but still has to wait three whole weeks before being considered fit for duty. He goes along with the first forces to Afghanistan. And Greg, of course, goes with. 

The next years are brutal. They both do two long tours of duty and then some in Afghanistan, and although they’d been in the country before, have had hard missions before, this isn’t the same at all. The leisurely pace, the sense of peace in between random bouts of fighting, it’s all gone. There’s mayhem everywhere, people dying, gunfire and bombs daily, and it just keeps coming. Greg gets shot twice in one year, once in the leg (three month recovery) and once in the chest (while wearing armor, thank god) and Ryan is beside him and insane with worry every time. Ryan gets hit by shrapnel (bomb, kills three good men) right at the end of their second tour and gets shipped back to the US only days before Greg. 

Ryan hasn’t been home in over a year, and although he has talked to Pat over the phone and through the internet often, she looks like a stranger when he opens his eyes and she’s there, right by the foot of his hospital bed. She smiles at him, but she has gained a sadness that seems to be ingrained now, into the lines of her face, the slope of her shoulders. 

When they’re home again, he sees the toys lying around, still, the teddy bears and the Sippy cups and Disney DVDs. Later he finds Pat in Mackenzie’s old room, and asks her whether there is anything he can do. He isn’t even surprised by her answer. 

She wants another one. 

This time Ryan says he won’t be a father. He won’t be around. He won’t love any kid, ever, or care for it, or do anything for it. And Pat just agrees. This time he actually says, “You should find someone else. Fall in love, marry again.” And he means it. But instead she just asks for this one thing, and Ryan gives it. They don’t have sex, she charts her ovulation dates and he comes over from Greg’s to hand her a cup. It works on the second try. And Greg thinks he’s crazy, sure, but he also seems to understand that at this point, there is almost nothing he won’t do for Pat.

Ryan is thirty-five when he becomes a father for the third time, to a girl Pat names Claire. He gets to see her through a grainy satellite feed from a tent camp in Northern Iraq. She’s small, red and squishy just like every other newborn he has ever seen. She’s also healthy, and probably the only selfless thing he has ever done for Pat, Ryan thinks morosely. Greg is at his shoulder, also looking at the feed, and together they wave and wish her good luck. Pat barely notices, she’s too busy beaming at her newborn daughter. 

 

\---

 

(Greg, 2005-2010)

Greg is nostalgic for the days when all of this was just one big adventure. When every new city and every new language meant another part of himself he had yet to discover. 

Now he can tell by the smell in which country they are, and how long those bodies have been decomposing. He doesn’t feel whole without the subtle weight of his dog tags. He lives in his uniform, and holds his gun at all times. Now, he’s no longer a civilian, free, ever. Now, he knows he’s grown hard, empty, right along with Ryan. 

Now they live through the fight, and every time they do, there is a new one waiting. You didn’t get shot today? Don’t worry, tomorrow will happen. 

And if it hadn’t been for Ryan, Greg would have quit a long time ago, gone to live in London, gone soft, or that’s what he says anyway. Truth is, he’s quite sure he’s too fucked up for a life like that anymore. The jokes don’t seem that funny. The possibility of sex not that attractive when he can grab, claw at Ryan’s clothes to get to a patch of sandy, sweaty, unmarred skin and touch and kiss and lick it as if it was a medallion, a protection against anything evil in this world. 

Ryan holds him as if it’s never enough. As if his fingertips try to read the Braille of his skin, but never quite get to the message hidden beneath. As if muscle, blood and bone could tell him the secret to make it all better, if only he listens closely enough. 

Greg begs Ryan not to leave him, when they lie crammed into a one person bed, faces pressed together, breath hot and kisses bruising on each other’s lips. What he means is, ‘Don’t die without me.’

Ryan says nothing, only holds him tighter, kisses him more, forces it better though mere touch. 

 

More people die, and it’s as if it barely matters. Mike lands in the hospital because of a heart attack. Once there he catches the virus and dies within days. Richard hangs himself on a rafter of the house they were sharing. Greg was never certain they were in love, both men too private and too career-conscious to talk about it. Now he’s sure. 

Josie, Caroline, Steve, Jim, everyone in London is alive, still, but Greg checks in with them often, afraid that one time they won’t answer and he’ll have been too late. They all seem equally eager for his voice, his stories. Friendships become greedy now. Every minute gets taken, stored away for the time it’ll be gone. 

His love for Ryan too. Greg knows that they’re going to die, sooner or later. And not in some distant way, he knows it with every fiber of his being that somewhere, some clock is ticking off the seconds. So he takes and takes and takes and Ryan does as well, they gather breaths and moans and sighs from each other as if every one will be the last.

Jen is in an armored vehicle, Iraq, when an enemy grenade gets thrown through the hatch. She survives, but loses her left leg. She never gets to go on a mission again. 

The government invents a vaccine that gets distributed to medical personnel first. There’s an eighty percent chance it gives you immunity for (what they hope) life. Twenty percent chance it kills you. Heather refuses to take it, and Jen agrees with her. Heather catches it and dies a year later anyway. 

Clive and Stephen and the three kids, nearly adults now, move together into a house on base, in open violation of DADT. Clive says the moment they bring it up he will resign his position. No one ever does. 

The years and deserts, deaths and guns all blur. Both Greg and Ryan get promoted because they don’t die in a war where many do. It becomes normal now to see people walking on the street with a mask covering their mouth and nose. No one shakes hands any more, and when they smile, you can’t tell but for the crinkle of their eyes. Life expectancy in the US drops back to fifty-five, then forty-five. 

Some blame the masks, the ridiculous anti-contamination measures, the anti-bacterial soaps and gloves that have been widespread for years. That people using them have no immune systems capable of fighting off anything anymore, and that that is why the infection is spreading so rapidly. There are waves of people ditching the precautions, and dying. People keeping to them strictly are dying anyway. Schools get closed. Some hospitals as well, because of lack of personnel. The stock markets crash completely over a series of months. The American dollar becomes as worthless as most other currencies. The internet dies down to a couple highly influential sites that still keep running. There are some protests, but most people avoid crowds. Some stealing, stores overrun. A whole lot of house breaking as the owners die and no one is there to take their place. 

And between all that, there is still normalcy. There are no real riots, no ‘Lord Of The Flies’ kind of stuff. Everyone is too afraid. 

And Greg and Ryan, they still have to get up at six am, when on the base. They run together in the rising sun, under a pink sky. Smoke the first cigarette of the day together hidden somewhere under a canopy if it rains, or walking the grass of the training fields if it doesn’t. They still eat in the mess, sitting shoulder to shoulder. 

They still have to listen to orders. 

 

\---

 

(Greg, 2010)

They’ve fought hard to never be split up over the years. But then that summer someone needs a translator in Kabul and Ryan is needed for something vague, an unspecified project that is going to hell in the desert somewhere. 

Greg considers flat-out refusing to go on the mission. Chickening out, facing dishonorable discharge. All he has to do is kiss Ryan in front of the right people, after all. But, the truth is that even that has gotten a lot more lax these days. Since more and more get sick, and wars keep escalating, they need greater numbers of soldiers desperately. To keep the peace, to keep people from panicking, to keep fighting an unwinnable conflict. As far as Greg knows, there hasn’t been anyone discharged for breaking DADT in years. He could probably stand on his head and shout “Oh by the way I’m gay, oh so gay,” and his commander would say, “That’s fine son,” hand him a gun and push him into the plane anyway. 

He could be gone for a year or more. He’s not sure how to even miss Ryan for that long. Not sure how to function without him by his side. They talk about it that night at home, all night. They live together permanently now. Jen has the main floor, so that she can get around easier with her crutches, or, on a bad day, wheelchair. 

They have sex, of course. There are five nights and four days, a hundred-and-ten hours, six thousand six hundred minutes running like sand through their fingers. 

Ryan kisses him, cheek raw with unshaved stubble, lips chapped and hard, crawls into his lap, and sighs, hot and wet into his ear, erection needy on his thigh. 

Greg wakes him up in the morning by rubbing his dick over Ryan’s ass. Ryan moans, and lets Greg fuck him in the crease between his legs and ass, leave red, bleeding scratches in his neck as trophies. 

“Do you think this is a curse?” Greg asks, some stolen moment where they’re lying naked in bed together, too spent to do anything more but count the lines of shadow and light through the blinds, too wound up to sleep. “The infection, the wars. Mankind was supposed to go some day, right?” 

Ryan looks at him, sorrow dull in his eyes. Reaches over, and kisses the question away. 

Greg thinks the answer is, “yes.” 

The next morning Ryan leaves, and Greg wonders whether he’ll ever see him again.

 

 

 

 


	13. Chapter 13

 

 

(Ryan, 2011)

Ryan is holding the hand of a man that could have been his best friend, if life would have been different. Colin’s eyes are closed, his fingers slowly turning cold. 

He briefly thinks of Pat. She died a month after he arrived in the bunker, although he didn’t find out until weeks later. There was nothing he could have done anyway. He thinks back to the first time he ever saw her. How beautiful she was. And to the last time, with a giggling Claire in her arms. She seemed happy. Beautiful, still. She’d been such a huge part of his life and yet he hadn’t known her all that well for most of it. 

Then he thinks of Greg. And he doesn’t want to wait any longer. He takes out the same eighty-liter back-pack he came with. Fills it up with spare clothes, food and water, a sleeping bag, a two-person tent. He packs for an outdoor trek because he isn’t sure what there is outside any more. He rides the creaking elevator up, Colin in a body bag with him, and breathes through a moment of claustrophobia. He had memorized the code for opening the lock months ago, but his fingers still shake when he punches it in slowly, securely. The seconds he waits for the mechanism to work are some of the longest of his life. He is well aware that if it doesn’t, he is going to be stuck there for the rest of his life. But the door hisses, metal groans when it opens slowly, and Ryan presses through the opening as fast as possible, suddenly childishly afraid that it will close again if he doesn’t hurry. 

And then steps outside, into a cool Arizona dawn. There is a breeze tickling his face. The air feels so clean. So full. There’s nothing but concrete and dust, as far as the eye can see, but he doesn’t mind because god, the sky. 

He buries Colin in the desert. 

 

\---

 

(Greg, 2011)

Eventually, Greg is one of the very last of the unit to survive. 

There are no more new fresh-faced, too-young soldiers coming over. No planes going back either. Greg asks to be recalled repeatedly, but gets no answer. He starts to fear he’ll be left behind in Afghanistan, and then decides that if the military isn’t going to get him out, he’ll get himself out.

It takes weeks, but eventually he manages to charm and blackmail his way into getting on a cargo plane back to Canada. He sits in-between crates, on the bare floor, without even a safety belt. But he doesn’t care. He’s done. The plane ride is uncomfortable and very long but for once, he feels hopeful. At least he’ll make it back home alive. 

As soon as the plane lands Greg plans to desert, but when it does there is no one there to stop him. Eventually he goes back to base, begs and yells and steals access codes to try and contact Ryan. Nobody answers. 

 

\---

 

(Ryan, 2011)

Ryan walks.

He doesn’t remember how many miles the drive was when he came here nearly a year ago by car. The roads are too quiet anyway, weeds growing through the asphalt. He searches for planes or choppers in the sky, and finds none. He follows the road all day, passes the first road block, deserted now, and sets up his tent with a fire beside it when it gets dark. He is not afraid. Ironically, this is exactly what he’s been training for all these years. 

He has no idea where Greg is. He fantasizes about hearing Greg’s voice. The last time they had sex. The first time. So many moments in between. The kisses and the fights, the mind-blowing orgasms and gut-wrenching guilt. He knows it all. He goddamn wants it all. 

The next day he walks straight into a town that has people, alive, going about their business and it stuns the hell out of him. He’d thought... Well, not this. Most people are in masks, hide behind their windows, or hurry over sidewalks, their eyes large and frightened. But they’re alive. 

He steals a car later, standing still and unlocked, keys in the ignition, among ten others in front of a doctor’s office. He imagines whoever it belonged to doesn’t need it any more. 

It’s disorienting to drive. It’s too fast, too much information at once after a year of stillness, but he forces himself to continue. The car has a GPS system that won’t connect to satellite, but the signs are clear enough, New Mexico, Texas, Missouri. Most roads are deserted, even freeways mostly clear, except an occasional road block. He eats from untended orchards and fields, and sleeps in his tent by the road. Occasionally breaks into mom and pop stores, once a Wal-Mart. Nearly all shelves are empty. He listens to the radio all day long; most channels have only white noise, but some still broadcast some news, or, even more surreal, music. Apparently they’re still at war, although Ryan’s not sure whether there are any more soldiers. Death tolls are unimaginable now. He’s seen all of this happen on TV, before. In zombie movies. Horror, death, mayhem. The reality is much quieter than a two-hour block buster. Much greyer. It’s the end of the world, but not with a bang. More like a slow, dragging groan. He steals fuel from abandoned cars. It’s easier than it should be. The few people he passes on the road tend to look away. 

It takes six days to reach the Toronto address Colin gave him. 

It’s a suburban house, in the type of neighborhood where Ryan would expect kids to play on the streets, ride their bikes, draw in chalk on the sidewalk. Now most of the front yards are overgrown. Weeds are taking over the rosebushes, creeping over the sandboxes, rusting the swing sets. Front doors are boarded up, ‘for sale’ signs everywhere. Undelivered papers litter the street. It’s eerily quiet. Ryan knocks on the door and waits. He has no hope, really. Only a promise. 

And then from the back of the house a boy appears. Messy curls, overly large jeans stained with mud. He looks tired, younger than sixteen, dark bruises under his eyes. Ryan says, “Luke?” And then, “Your dad, Colin, he sent me.” 

Luke doesn’t cry. Doesn’t react much at all. He packs a backpack with clothes and fresh vegetables, sets the backyard’s chickens free, neatly locks the door behind him. They’ve been driving for hours before he even asks where they’re going. 

Ryan says, “North Carolina,” and wonders whether Colin had intended this, for him to take his son. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t have a plan either, of course he doesn’t, just that he wants to go home, wants to see it once more before it’s all over. 

 

The day drags by slowly. It gets dark, and Luke dozes against the window. They stop to stand next to the car and eat some carrots. They’re surprisingly good. It’s after midnight, nearing on two am by the time that they get close. 

Twenty minutes. Ten. Ryan breaks a couple speed limits driving those last couple of miles. And then it’s there. Greg’s house. It’s completely dark, but so are all the houses on the block. Ryan drives the car onto the sidewalk, and kills the engine, heart hammering. There are no guaranties. Although his own immunity seems to keep up, there’s no way to tell whether Greg’s has. Or Clive’s. And even if it did, Greg has spent many months in the middle of, if Ryan can believe the news, the war with the most casualties in recorded history. 

Ryan looks at Luke. “This is the first one we’re going to try,” he says. There’s a large chance Greg isn’t here. That he is still in the Middle East. Or moved house, or base. Or died. He tries to prepare himself for the worst. Then gets out. 

Ryan can vaguely hear the sound of Luke getting out as well, but he just walks to the front door, as if pulled towards it. He rings the bell, and then, remembering the possible lack of electricity, knocks on the door, hard. Then rings the bell again, and knocks again. Luke appears behind him, silently. 

They wait a long time, but no one comes.

Ryan feels physically sick. He walks back to the car on wooden legs, barely registers that Luke follows. Next stop is Clive’s. He focuses on steering. He doesn’t think he can handle it, if Greg’s dead. He’ll leave Luke on base, walk out into a field somewhere and shoot his own brains out. He’s certain of it with an intense clarity, right now. Luke must see the look on his face, because even though they are on a quiet, suburban street, he fastens his seatbelt. Ryan breathes out shakily. 

When they reach Clive’s house, he steps out of the car much slower than he did before. The grass is wet with dew. Maybe it would be better never to know. Never to have to hear Clive say it. Ryan knocks on the door, waits, (for some reason his knuckles are bleeding. Was that from Greg’s door? He shakes his head.) 

Then the light in the hallway turns on. Ryan blinks and reassures himself that yes, it is a light. He hears a sound, footsteps perhaps. Luke next to him shifts. 

The door opens on a chain, and they’re looking right at the barrel of an army-issue gun. “What the fuck do you want?” 

Ryan instantly recognizes the voice and gasps. “Jen.” Cranes to see a glimpse of her face. Then says louder, “Jen, Jen, it’s me, Ryan.” 

He hears her say distinctly, “Oh my god,” while she closes the door to unlock the chain and throws it wide open. The light is almost blinding. Jen is in sweats, one pant leg tied in a knot where her knee used to be, and an old ratty t-shirt that reads ‘Fuck Gender’. She is supporting herself with one hand on a pink crutch, the other holding her gun, turned down now. Her face, obviously right out of bed, slowly opens up into a full smile. It’s amazing to see her. Ryan does his best to smile back at her even though he’s sure it comes out more manic that anything, and says, “Where’s Greg? Is he here?” Clive comes up behind her, blinking and hurriedly tying a purple bath robe around himself. He’s _beaming_. 

“Yes,” Jen says, still wearing that dazed smile, as if she can’t believe he’s really here. 

“He’s alive?” Ryan asks. He doesn’t recognize his own voice. It sounds strangled, afraid. 

“Yes!” Jen says again, and Clive adds, “He’s upstairs.” There is more commotion behind them, doors opening, Stephen appearing. Ryan realizes his ears are rushing, his vision grays out around the edges. He wonders if he’s going to pass out from sheer exhaustion and emotion right on their doorstep. Jen takes his hand, and pulls him into the hallway, and then. 

Racing down the stairs in only boxers, hair wild, glasses askew, there is Greg. 

He sees Ryan, shouts something and then they are both pushing people aside, seconds slow, air like molasses. They touch, slam into each other. Ryan feels like he can’t breathe. 

Greg’s skin. 

His eyes. 

His voice. 

It’s incredible. Ryan obsessively runs his hands over Greg, his face, his back, looking for injuries or just confirming that he’s real, both maybe. Greg’s talking, a waterfall of words, repeatedly asking, “Are you ok? Ryan, are you all right?” and Ryan doesn’t reply because he can’t manage to open his mouth. He realizes he’s crying when his vision goes blurry, but he doesn’t care, and neither does Greg, kissing him, laughing loudly, holding him as if he’ll never let go. 

At forty-two, Ryan has been in friendship and lust with Greg for twenty years, and he’s never loved for him more than he does in this exact moment. He doesn’t know for how long they stand there, it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t want to take his eyes or hands off Greg for one burning second. He traces the lines of Greg’s face, wonders whether they’ve deepened in the last year. He kisses him to find his taste. He smells him, feels Greg’s shoulders beneath his own, the strength of his arms around him. Ryan feels overwhelmed, sensation all around him, everything bright, sharp, a tidal wave of feeling. It’s strong, he looks at Greg and then corrects himself, no, _they’re_ strong. They’ve seen the world between them, and the world has gone and died. 

 

The next time Ryan looks up, he sees Stephen, traces of grey in his hair now, carrying a little girl, wrapped in a red blanket and a teddy bear he recognizes as Claire’s. His stomach clenches. Jen is at the table, laughing and serving Luke something that smells like food. Clive is next to her and keeps on throwing them glances; eyes suspiciously shiny. 

“You want to eat?” Greg asks him, intimate, into his ear, and Ryan wants to say no and just go back to holding him, but Greg takes his hesitation for a yes and pushes him to the table. There is already a plate set out for him.

They sit close together, and Ryan tries to take in the sheer luxury of seeing so many people around the table. Luke seems shell-shocked, still, but he’s also eating eagerly and answering Stephen’s questions. Clive has aged a lot in the last couple of years. He has lost almost all of his hair, but what remains is still white-blond. He is dabbing his eyes with a napkin, and Stephen kisses him, briefly. Jen seems healthier than she was when he left, scars healed, happy sitting between them, comfortable. 

Stephen has Claire on his lap. She is awake, her eyes small, cheeks flushed with sleep, clutching her teddy bear and looking at them curiously. She has two missing front teeth. She looks exactly like Mackenzie did at that age. Ryan finds he doesn’t want to look at her, but can’t ignore her either. ‘She’ll die all over again,’ he thinks suddenly, and it’s shockingly painful, like a stab to the chest. She sleepily smiles at him without recognition in her eyes. She doesn’t know who he is. 

“She had nowhere else to go,” Clive tells him softly. Ryan nods and looks away. 

Greg leans into him, and Ryan lets his heat seep through his shoulder, distract him. Greg’s still only in boxer shorts. Ryan only has to let his eyes flick over to Greg’s before Greg pulls him closer and kisses his cheek. It’s a pinpoint of pleasure, an exhale, a promise that things are fine. Luke visibly blushes and averts his eyes. Jen gently teases them about it. Greg rolls his eyes and it’s so comfortingly familiar it hurts. 

They stay up talking for about half an hour more, until Ryan feels exhaustion wave in every movement, every word and Greg pushes him up towards his bedroom. He is worn after the last year, after the last decade. He feels raw now, every emotion laid bare, and he can read it in Greg’s eyes as well. They pull off their clothes, leave a trail of them on the floor, fall into bed. There is a flicker of dawn at the window. They watch the beginning of it together, bunched under the blankets, sky turning purple and red. It feels tentative, still. Unspoken and delicate. This grand, golden hope to survive together. 

Greg turns to him, face outlined starkly by the new sun, and says, “The world is ending soon.” Traces his fingers over Ryan’s lips, his cheek bones, around his eyes with heartbreaking focus, as if he can’t get enough, as if he has to make sure every inch of him is still there. 

Ryan can’t stop looking at him either. He wants to burn the image in his mind. Greg, exactly the way he is right now. Keep it as his most treasured memory, hide it deep behind his ribs, curl around it on cold nights. He touches Greg’s cheek, leans in close and says, “Not yet, I think. Not yet.” 

And Greg kisses him.

 

 

 

 


End file.
